AMD Planning 2000 Series Ryzen Processors on 14nm+

After their recent Analyst Day event, AMD shared some details about their future Ryzen plans. As we all know by now, AMD set up Ryzen to be a long term brand they hope to build. Underlying Ryzen, AMD has their new iterative Zen architecture. In order to keep Ryzen and Zen in synchronisation, AMD laid out some long-term roadmaps for the future. During a post-event conference call, AMD revealed their plans for their next processor release.

Just like Intel, AMD has plans to pace out their release. While Intel had the clockwork Tick Tock and now Process Architecture Optimization, AMD has no fancy name. The company does appear to have an alternating refresh of the architecture and process nodes. Following up on the first generation of Ryzen processors based on Zen with the 14nm process, AMD will release Zen based processors on a refined 14nm process.

Once AMD taps into the refined 14nm process, the company hopes to move onto 7nm. These 7nm processors will be based on the new Zen2 architecture which depending on the source may bring a 15% IPC improvement. AMD has not revealed many details about these Zen 2 processors. These Ryzen processors will likely feature 2xxx branding and arrive sometime next year.

With their roadmap, AMD is adopting a hybrid of Intel’s strategy. AMD appears to want to utilise processes for more than one generation of processors. This allows AMD to defray the costs of moving to new processes. The company is acting more aggressively in some ways though. For instance, Intel only utilises a new architecture on an established process. With Zen2, AMD is debuting the architecture on the new 7nm process. This is just like how Ryzen debuted Zen on the new 14nm process. Given their underdog status, AMD likely has no choice but to move in a more aggressive and risky manner. With Ryzen being widely praised, it appears this strategy is paying off.