As we draw closer to the official launch of AMD's new Zen CPU architecture, more and more details have started to appear online, including the latest coming from AMD China partner, which suggest that it will be officially launching on January 17th.

According to details provided by Maxsun, a big AMD motherboard partner in China, the Zen architecture will launch on January 17th, with the announcement possibly happening at CES 2017. The same source also suggest that the second wave is coming in March 2017, which corresponds with earlier rumors that AMD will first launch high-end SKUs while entry- and mainstream-level chips will come later.

The same source notes that the earlier rumored pricing scheme might be correct, suggesting that the high-end SKU, earlier named as the SR7, will launch at 1500 to 2000 Yuan, or around US $250 to $300.

The reported performance levels are also impressive, as the AMD Zen high-end SKU, the 8-core, 16-thread part, will compete with Intel's Core i7-6900K. With a much lower price, AMD will certainly put a lot of pressure on Intel, at least if the real-world performance levels match those rumored ones.

Maxsun also reported the final clocks of AMD's high-end chip, suggesting that it works at 3.3GHz base and 3.5GHz boost, which is a significant improvement from 3GHz we saw on engineering samples.

Hopefully, AMD's Zen lineup will deliver on its promises as AMD is certainly putting a lot of faith in it and we certainly are looking forward to some competition in the CPU market.





Source: Techpowerup.com.