AMD CEO Confirms Zen Desktop Chips Launching Early 2017

AMD’s Zen architecture could revolutionise the company’s fortunes in the CPU market and offer a wonderful alternative to Intel products. Of course, there’s a lot of expectation regarding what Zen is capable of and only time will tell if AMD can deliver. During the recent Q3 earnings call, AMD CEO, Dr Lisa Su addressed questions about Zen’s performance and without going into specific details said:

Chris Hemmelgarn of Barclays :
“With Summit Ridge launching in Q1 of 2017, I guess how would you expect the channel to ramp that? Do you see it ramping pretty fully in the first couple of quarters of the year, or are you looking for more normal PC seasonality?”

President & CEO Dr. Lisa Su :
“You know, I would expect that there will be a relatively good initial demand for Summit Ridge that may be you know, not quite at the seasonal patterns. From where we see, Summit Ridge is playing in a space in the high-end desktop that we currently aren’t offering a product. So we believe we’ll be competitive certainly with Core I5 as well as Core I7 and we will be launching in those areas.”

The term competitive is open to interpretation but I’m assuming this means Zen products perform almost identical, slightly better or worse than competing Intel solutions at a much more enticing price point. When discussing the scheduled Q1 2017 release, Dr Lisa Su clarified that the company is on track and Zen will ship in large volumes during early 2017:

Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein Research :
“I just want to get some clarification on the timing of the Summit Ridge and Zen launches. So, you said Summit Ridge launches obviously in Q1 17. You had said before that you were going to be shipping at least some product in Q4 of this year, is that still true? And around the server launch in Q2, does that mean the volume is actually in Q3?”

President & CEO Dr. Lisa Su :
“So I think our expectation is, we may ship some production samples in Q4, but the volume launch for desktop will be in Q1, and that’s consistent with everything that we have planned into the business. And as it relates to server, I think it’s a little early to tell. I think we’ll go through our process, and our customers’ processes, and we’ll have more color on that, as we get into next year.”

This is great to hear and suggests AMD isn’t encountering production problems or something else which could cause Zen’s release to fall back. Also, the comments regarding performance evoke a sense of confidence and I cannot wait to see what AMD has in store.