One of the things that never gets old with the tech industry is the crazy and wacky code names they come up with. Honestly, sometimes I have no idea how they come up with them at all. AMD has seen their share of interesting code names and it gets more interesting once Zen arrives. According to the newest and unconfirmed leak, it appears that AMD is going to move to an avian, that means birds, based code names going forward.
Starting after Raven Ridge for the initial Zen APUs, the replacement platforms reportedly feature Avian code names, mainly birds of prey. Starting with the 14nm generation, we have Horned Owl which will replace Raven Ridge as the mainstream APU platform. Banded Kestrel is a smaller version of Horned Owl for lower power operations. Both are meant for the embedded market mainly but Banded Kestrel will make to AM4 as well.
For the server side of the business, we have Snowy Owl which will be a massive 14nm APU. This will likely feature Zen in the form of Naples paired with a GCN GPU portion. For the 7nm, we have Grey Hawk which we covered earlier. This will use the newer Zen+ architecture of course and will likely arrive sometime in 2019. Given the unconfirmed nature of these codenames, I would take the information with a grain of salt but suffice to say AMD already has everything lined up for the next couple of years.
A thriving AMD is good for everyone. I really hope the new line of chips will bring in enough money to ramp up their R&D.