AMD Zen and Intel Kaby Lake to go head to head

Both coming at the end of 2016

According to the latest report, it appears that AMD Zen and Intel Kaby Lake will have a chance for a direct battle as both should be launching at the same time, end of 2016.

According to a latest report from Digitimes, Intel's Kaby Lake has been delayed and the new schedule put them in line with AMD's launch schedule for the upcoming Zen-based chips.

Although expected to be released in Q3 2016, it appears that the mass production of Intel's Kaby Lake chips is expected in November and December while only a small amount of chips, most likely U-series chips for Ultrabooks, will be available in mid-June.

In case you missed them, Intel's Kaby Lake are expected to be the last chips made on 14nm manufacturing process and are pretty much a Skylake-refresh chips which should hold the market before Intel releases its 10nm Cannonlake architecture in 2017.



Bear in mind that Kaby Lake is also an anomaly in Intel's Tick-Tock strategy, where Tick is a node shrink with new manufacturing process (14nm Broadwell) while Tock is a new architecture (14nm Skylake). Upcoming 14nm Kaby Lake is neither, but a rather anomaly or a semi-tock, since it will still be based on both the same manufacturing process and be built on the same foundations as the Skylake architecture, but with some performance enhancements.

AMD on the other hand is putting all of its eggs in one basket, which is Zen architecture. The new architecture will be released in high-end desktop CPUs which are scheduled for the end of 2016, or same as Kaby Lake.

According to the same report, motherboard manufacturers are quite positive about AMD's upcoming Zen platform and its "improved performance and strong price competitiveness," which could result in higher market coverage.




In any case, the end of this year will be quite interesting when it comes to Intel vs. AMD CPU battle. While we doubt that AMD will bring back the Athlon 64 days, we certainly hope it will at least give Intel a run for its money and bring the company back on its track.



Source: Digitimes.com.



News by Luca Rocchi and Marc Büchel - German Translation by Paul Görnhardt - Italian Translation by Francesco Daghini


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AMD Zen and Intel Kaby Lake to go head to head - CPUs - News - ocaholic