Dr. Lisa Su, AMD CEO, announced during the company’s Q4 earning call that Ryzen CPUs would debut in early March, while Vega GPUs will come to market in Q2. AMD has a busy 2017 launch schedule that also includes Naples server chips in Q2 and the Zen core-based Raven Ridge APUs in the second half of the year.
Su said the company would initially offer its leading Ryzen products in conjunction with a wide range of system part proivers, and a staged OEM launch will commence shortly thereafter. At CES this year AMD had a ton of motherboards out from the the major players in the world, not just the US. The motherboards boards ranged in size from min-ITX to tull ATX.
AMD plans go head to head with Intel’s i5 and i7 cPus with its leading products, but the company also has plans to address the entire desktop spectrum with future Ryzen processors. Su noted that the combination of high-end Ryzen CPUs and Vega GPUs would allow the company to quickly grab share in the high-performance segment.
Ryzen moves AMD CPUs from 28nm/32nm to the new FinFET 14nm process.. Su referred to the next-generation products as “Zen 2” and “Zen 3.” The company previously announced that it would provide a Zen+ variant as the successor to the original Zen core, but hasn’t specified “+” products will be.
AMD’s road map includes a move 7nm, which should not a shocker, since they signed a 5 year Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) with GlobalFoundries. The agreement came right after GlobalFoundries said it would skip the 10nm node, which it considers a half-node, in favor of moving directly to its 7nm process.
AMD is now doing well on the financial side too. The company spent the last two years rebuilding the firm on the technical, operational, and financial fronts. AMDs joint venture with Chinese state-backed companies have investors sign happy songs. AMD’s stock has jumped over 300% last year following its announcement that it is sharing CPU (including Zen) and SoC technology through its The Tianjin Haiguang Technology Investment Co. Ltd. (THATIC) venture. Google Announces plans to use AMD GPUs for Accelerating Machine Learning In The Cloud, helped make investors happy as well
