Calm Before The Storm? Zen-based CPUs To Dominate AMD’s Desktop And Mobile Lineup In 2016

If you’ve been wondering when AMD’s next serious attack on the CPU market would be coming, it looks like your question has just been answered. According to ExtremeTech, which has come across a couple of slides set to be shown off during a financial analyst day on May 6th, 2016 is going to be a major year for AMD.

At the forefront, almost all of AMD’s 2016 chips will be built using the brand-new Zen core, which for any one of the platforms AMD supports will represent an enormous drop to a 14nm process. AMD’s current desktop APUs are 28nm, for comparison, while its Piledriver-based FX chips are 32nm. This change alone is going to reap some great benefits, but the architecture itself has a worthwhile bag of tricks to enhance the overall package.

On the enthusiast side, “Summit Ridge” will feature up to 8 Zen cores, while for the mainstream audience, there’s “Bristol Ridge”, supporting up to 4 cores. At the lower-end is “Basilisk”, delivering some dual-core options. Both the high-end Summit Ridge and Bristol Ridge use the exact same FM3 socket, so it seems likely that users would be able to upgrade from an APU to an FX chip during Zen’s lifecycle.

Bristol Ridge becomes mobile’s high-end AMD solution, while Basilisk falls right below it. For the “ultra-low” segment, AMD will deliver “Styx”, which makes use of K12 ARMv8-infused cores. An odd model, but seemingly perfect for the upcoming Windows 10 “IoT” variant.

It should be stressed that while the above slide looks legitimate, it’s hard to treat it as concrete until AMD’s analyst day is done and over with. What’s seen so far sounds extremely hopeful, though. If there’s a downside, it’s that it will take at least an entire year to see these products hit the market. For the enthusiast side, that’d mark a four-year gap in between an update (Piledriver was released mid-2012).