AMD Confirms Ryzen Set for Early March Launch

During their latest earnings call, AMD revealed some more key details for their CPU roadmap. As has already been confirmed by AMD, their new Ryzen CPUs are set to launch sometime in Q1 2017. CEO Lisa Su has now confirmed that the launch will take place in early March. What’s more, they are still aiming for widespread system availability from day one.

“There will be widespread system availability from day one”

As we already known from previous leaks, the most likely launch venue will be GDC. This major gaming conference will take place during the final week of February and into the first week of March. From the start, it looks like major vendors like Dell, HP, ASUS and Acer will have Ryzen systems available right away. Channel vendors and system integrators will also see day one supply with everyone else to follow shortly.

According to Su, Ryzen will be aimed at the high-end of the market targeting Intel’s  i5 and i7 CPUs. This is in line with previous rumors of quad core up to octa-core chips. AMD is most likely leaving the dual-core offerings to the APU lineup that will follow on. Moving forward, AMD is already working on “Zen 2” and “Zen 3” with a focus on 7nm. AMD has revealed that Zen will be following a 4 year cadence so it will be interesting to see if these follow-up Zen keep the same architecture or move to Zen+ and beyond.

It’s hard to believe but in just over a month, we will finally have strong competition in the x86 CPU space. One can only hope that AMD will be able to deliver on the hype and offer both performance and pricing to compete against Intel.