AMD Zen, 8 Cores 16 Threads For $300, Expected To Launch January 17th

We keep on getting closer and closer to the official launch of AMD’s Zen processors. With that we keep on seeing leaks and rumors all over the place. The latest comes from MAXSUN, an AMD China partner. The information they have provided is for sure to bring excitement for AMD fans and for everyone who has been anxiously waiting for the Zen launch.

According to them the official release date for Zen will be January 17th, which if that is true then we should expect to see an official product announcement at or around CES 2017 (Jan 5-8). Of course we know Intel will be officially announcing their “Kaby Lake” chips at CES in January as well. AMD will actually have a second release window for Zen around March 2017. This makes us believe AMD will be staggering the launch of Zen parts. They will start with the high-end desktop (HEDT) parts and go down from there. The Zen chips are rumored to be named “SR7”, “SR5”, and “SR3”. The “SR” stands for Summit Ridge. This naming scheme is much like how Intel names their Core processors (Core i7, Core i5, Core i3).

path-to-zen

MAXSUN says that the SR7 parts are expected to be priced at around 1500-2000 Yuan SKU ($250-$300). That is not bad considering what this chip could offer in terms of performance. AMD’s 8 core, 16 thread chips would be competitive with Intel’s $1089 i7-6900K, an equally 8 core, 16 thread offering.

MAXSUN also provided finalized clocks for the chip, which improve upon the 3.0 GHz engineering samples that have been floating around. The chips should be around 3.15-3.30 GHz base clock and have a 3.5 GHz boost. They also report that Zen can easily be overclocked to 4.2 GHz on air, and up to 5.0 GHz on LN2.

Of course we cannot confirm any of this so you should take it with a grain of salt, but it will be very interesting to see if AMD can deliver on Zen.

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