AMD Zen Octa-core release date, news, specs rumors: early 2017 debut for powerful Zen CPU

Miguel Salonga Thursday, November 17, 2016

AMD is about to update its list of processors with Zen, which is rumored to boast an advantage over Intel Core processors. | Wikimedia Commons

For the past few months, there have been speculations that AMD is already working on its new set of CPUs to be released early next year. AMD is known for their powerful processors that today's top electronics company have been using to make highly efficient devices.

According to the latest rumors, AMD is developing a new type of chipset called Zen, which is expected to make the company stand out from their competitors in the market. The AMD Zen will be a high-performance processor, having an edge over the company's previously released chipset. The details surfacing on the internet suggest that the AMD Zen will be a fabricated octa-core chipset employing the x86-processor architecture. It is also rumored to feature 16 hardware threads and a 14 nm low-power FinFET.

The AMD Zen is now also tagged as the Summit Ridge, and if the rumors are anything to go by, the consumers can expect the brand new processors stocked on the market's shelves in the first quarter of 2017. Many tech experts believe that the AMD Zen or Summit Ridge's performance boasts 40 percent more instructions per cyclone compared to AMD's most recent top-tier CPU.

According to Game Debate, the upcoming AMD Zen flagship CPU will be an AMD 680K that has an initial selling price of $300. This is quite surprising given that the Zen CPU is coming in powerful with 8 physical cores and 16 CPU threads, not to mention its likeness to other high-performance CPUs in the market today.

The Zen is being compared to the Haswell-E CPU in terms of performance. The Haswell-E is also similar at the very least to the Intel Core i7-5960X, which was released back then with a whopping $1000. With this, the AMD Zen can be seen as a high-level processor but is being packaged as a quite affordable CPU in the mid-range market.

Yibada reported that another AMD chipset aside from Zen is also spotted for release in the coming months. The other AMD processor with the codename "Naples," is expected to appear in dual socket 32-core systems with 64 CPU threads per socket.