AMD Zen release date, news and updates: AMD unveils the Zen-based Ryzen

Intel had better watch out because AMD is coming back with a vengeance. AMD just unveiled its upcoming desktop processor, Ryzen (pronounced Rye-zen), at the company's New Horizon event on Dec. 13, and it will be based on the Zen computer processor microarchitecture AMD has been developing for the past few years.

Ryzen will be the first Zen-based desktop processor in the market when it comes out in the first quarter of 2017. The Ryzen notebook processors will come out in the second quarter of 2017.

In a statement, AMD's Jim Anderson revealed that they have designed the Ryzen processors to handle the immense amounts of processing and graphics power needed to run virtual reality (VR) and 3D modeling applications.

What's so special about AMD's Zen architecture? Here's a little overview of the Ryzen to give readers a look at what the Zen can do. The Ryzen is going to be an eight core, 16-thread (two threads per cores) processor running at 3.4GHz. And according to AMD, it can actually match or even outperform Intel's Broadwell-E-based Core i7 6900K.

The Ryzen is also more efficient than the Core i7 6900K in terms of performance-per-watt since the processor gives off considerably less heat at 95-watt TDP compared to the Core i7 6900K's 140-watt TDP. Furthermore, the Ryzen has 4MB of L2 cache and 16MB of L3 cache.

AMD also compared the game frame-rates of the Ryzen and the Core i7 6900K while playing "Battlefield 1" at 4K resolution. Each processor was paired with a Nvidia Titan X graphics processing unit (GPU), and the Ryzen showed better frame-rates.

AMD has also included its SenseMI technology in the Ryzen. According to AMD, SenseMI is "a set of sensing, adapting, and learning technologies built into the AMD Ryzen processor that combine with multiple other advances in architectural, platform, efficiency, and processing technology to address the demanding needs of gamers and enthusiast PC users."