Speaking about AMD's plans for 2016 in a round table discussion at CES 2016, CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that Zen CPUs are on track to be available by the end of 2016 for high-end desktops. Su expressed her excitement about Zen, explaining that she has personally been inundated with requests from enthusiasts saying "we want Zen sooner" .
Su emphasized that Zen - and Polaris - products will be "very competitive".
“The idea that AMD is a cheap solution has to be replaced with the idea that AMD is a very competitive solution,”
Drew Prairie, Director Corporate Communications, announced that more technical details about Zen will be revealed throughout the year.
Su went on to state that thanks to the remarkable performance and power advantages that 14nm FinFET delivers over 28nm, the company decided to adopt the process technology early. As such the first Zen CPUs from the earliest production runs will be available before the end of the year, with significant expansion in volumes by 2017. Additionally, John Taylor - AMD's corporate vice president of worldwide marketing - affirmed that Zen based APUs will be available 18 months from now, in mid 2017.
Before we proceed I have to point out that this is exactly what we had reported in our exclusive report about Zen in November in relation to the availability schedule of Zen CPUs and APUs. We've also laid out several details about Zen CPUs, APUs, AM4 motherboards and their features that haven't been made public yet. So we'd highly recommend giving that report a read if you haven't yet.
AMD CEO Confirms : Zen CPUs Will Be Available Before The End Of The Year, APUs Coming in 2017
Zen based ,8th generation, APUs will represent a major leap in performance and power thanks to the Zen CPU core, next generation graphics architecture and 14nm FinFET process. Taylor expressed a lot of excitement about the company's 8th generation APUs, saying that this leap will enable the company to compete head to head with its rival Intel in high-end notebooks. This is a significant step for the company that has seen its APUs for the most part be go into the mid-range and low cost offerings by OEMs and less so in high-end designs. This will not be the case with AMD's 8th generation Zen APUs, Taylor asserted with confidence.
All in all CEO Lisa Su was very optimistic about 2016. "The overall expectation is that AMD will be a better year from a financial standpoint compared to 2015,” Su also said she believes that by the same time next year everyone will say "AMD is back!". We certainly hope that this does come to fruition. The CPU market has gone for far too long without true competition. In the meantime,If you want to learn more about Zen we've compiled everything that we know so far about the architecture, products and platform in one article that you can find here.
