AMD Zen Summit Ridge Rollout Detailed

In a little over two months, AMD will likely have launched their new Zen series of CPUs. While we know some details about the type of lineup is planning, there have been few details about the rollout. In a new leak just out, we now have the AMD roadmap for the upcoming Zen launch. Needless to say, this is an unconfirmed leak so take the information with a grain of salt.

According to the leaked roadmap slide, AMD is planning on segment Zen into three different tiers. At the high end we have SR7, followed by SR5 in the mid range and SR3 as the lowest tier. This mirrors the setup Intel has with Core i7, i5 and i3. It also marks a departure from AMD’s current practice of 8xxx, 6xxx and 4xxx which one-ups the Intel model numbers.

As expected, the the SR7 chips launch first followed by SR5 and SR3 successively. AMD is known to be planning octa core and quad core units for sure along with SMT to double the thread count. It will be interesting to see how AMD manages to divvy up their chips. SR7 is obviously octa core with SMT while SR3 is likely quad cores without SMT. This leaves SR5 as potentially hexa core, quad core with SMT or octa core without SMT. One clue is that all the Zen chips will cost above $200, so quad core is likely the base unit. I suppose Zen based APUs will fill the budget market gap.

In addition to the regular Zen Summit Ridge chips, we also have a series of enthusiast-targeted CPUs. These will come with better binning and faster than normal stock clock speeds. They will not come with a stock cooler but the rest of the SR7 and other SR chips will. It will be interesting to see what AMD has prepared for us at CES 2017 where Zen will almost certainly launch.