AMD Zen Pricing and Release Date Revealed

In the months leading up to the Zen launch, AMD has vague about the launch date and pricing. All we know officially is that Zen will launch sometime in Q1 2017 and at a competitive price. Rumours had pointed to a launch at CES in early 2017. but we now have new information that contradicts that. According to the latest leaks, Zen will launch on in the middle of the month on January 2017.

Purported to come from an OEM partner letter, this is the first firm news about the launch date. There is also some indication of a March launch of more SKUs which may be the mid range SR5 or SR3 chips. While the launch won’t be until mid-January, we may get some more details at CES about the specific lineup. We may even get a soft launch at CES with all of the juicy details followed by the hard launch on 17th.

In terms of price, there will be a top-end SR7 chip priced around $250-300. This will offer performance comparable to the i7 6850K which costs around $600. The report suggests that this the full 8 core 16 thread SR7 while the i7 6850K is 6 core 12 thread. So far, the leaks have pointed to Broadwell levels of IPC which suggests that this SR7 is either clocked low or AMD is not keeping up in Cinebench/overall IPC.

For those seeking more performance, there will be more overclocking oriented chips which are priced around $500 with higher stock clocks. Paired up with AM4 X370 motherboards, they should be a potent alternative to Intel’s X99. Regular clocks do appear to be a tad low peaking at about 3.5 Ghz with overclocking to 4.2 Ghz. This likely won’t match Intel but we’ll wait and see. Overall, 2017 looks like to be one of the best years yet for the CPU market.