When the first reports of Zen came out from AMD, the suggestion was that they would arrive in late 2016. Some rumours even pointed to October as the likely release. however, as time has gone on , AMD hs clarified that Zen would only be shipping in later 2016 and that mainstream CPUs would likely arrive in early 2017. According to the latest set of rumours, it appears that AMD has settled upon February 2017 as their release date for their new x86 architecture.
Coincidently, Intel is also set to release their mainstream Kaby Lake CPUs at the same time. Kaby Lake will be launching later this year but that is only for low-power mobile chips. This means AMD’s Zen and Intel’s Kaby Lake have a chance to go toe to toe for once and battle it out over the consumer. Both architectures are also based on 14nm FinFET process nodes which will finally bring AMD to some form of parity after several years.
The big question, of course, is how much ground has AMD managed to make up. With 40%+ IPC increase, AMD will likely move to Broadwell levels of performance and the new SMT may prove a decent counter to Intel’s hyperthreading. The new AM4 chipsets also provide a much-needed refresh in terms of connectivity and integration. Hopefully, we’ll soon see a much more vibrant and competitive x86 CPU marker once more.
