AMD Zen Summit Ridge news, update: CPU to be launched on Jan. 17; SR3 and SR5 variants on March 2017

AMD is on the verge of releasing another processor that will be positioned as a premium chip that delivers excellent performance. The Zen Summit Ridge central processing unit (CPU) is set to be launched in 2017 at the Consumers Electronics Show (CES 2017).

Next year's Consumers Electronics Show will be held on January 5 to 8 in Las Vegas, Nevada. According to several reports, the AMD Zen Summit Ridge CPU will be released at the event following the leaked launch date, as well as the price, of the upcoming processor.

A post on Baidu, which was translated by Hexus, showed pertinent details for Maxsun, a motherboard manufacturer, who said that AMD's first chip will be premium and will be priced between $200 and $500. The chips are apparently part of the AMD Zen SR7 series and will be available to top-of-the-line desktops on January 17, 2017.

Rumors claim that there will be three variants to be released, the SR7, SR5 and SR3. The SR7 CPUs will be the premium model and will be available for about $250 to $300. A special overclock option is said to be available, but will cost expensively at around $500 or so. The SR3 and SR5 models are more affordable with $200 to $300 approximate prices.

It is believed that the SR7 chip will have a base clock of 3.15 GHz to about 3.3 GHz base, and can be boosted to 4.2 GHz with conventional overclock speeds. The processor is said to be comparable to the Core i7-6850K processor, but will differ in configuration as the SR7 may possibly contain 8C/16T parts while its counterpart has C/12T in Cinebench.

Tech analysts believe that SR7 may be the preferred choice among customers since it is still made affordable despite the high-end specs. Intel's Core i7-6850K CPU has a price tag of $600.

The SR5 and SR3 variants are expected to come out on March 2017. More updates will be coming soon so stay tuned.