2016 seems pretty exciting. The AMD Bristol Ridge APU with HBM graphics may finally start to offer R9 270(X) like performance from an IGP !!:banana: Gamers on a budget can do gaming at 1080p smoothly. Its a huge blow to nVidia midrange GPU segment. Even Intel will deliver better IGPs based on Iris graphics at 2016 for sure.

"The GCN based IGP will even support HSA (3D stacked graphics memory)" That doesn't seem to make sense. HSA has nothing to do with stacked memory. Typo (should be HBM, right)?

So... Fm2+ was a joke... thanks AMD ...

How is it a joke? AMD still has at least 1 more processor series being released on FM2+.

I didn't say it was exciting, but it's coming. AMD has to start focusing on performance. They can't do that, while maintaining backwards compatibility. At some point, AMD has to start showing profit from the CPU division.

This makes me wonder where this going to compete at as far as competition goes for CPUs. Is the Zen 8 core going up against the current or future X platform CPUs from Intel or the future Z platform Cpus?

^Whatever they compete against u can be certain amd will price competitively

With Intel stubbornly sticking to 4 cores (unless you want to lose an arm and a leg in the deal), it seems to me AMD would find a good market with an 8-core CPU, provided the cores don't suck and are even relatively close to Intel's. AMD's prices have always been good, after all.

I'm so excited for Zen! 2016 cannot come fast enough!

I just hope Goflo/Samsung deliver for them.

With Intel stubbornly sticking to 4 cores (unless you want to lose an arm and a leg in the deal), it seems to me AMD would find a good market with an 8-core CPU, provided the cores don't suck and are even relatively close to Intel's. AMD's prices have always been good, after all.

Intel stuck to quad cores for the very sole reason that games are severely limited multithreading-wise. DX12 will be here to address this issue. This decision was likely the reason for Intel's success in the past years. CPUs as general-purpose as possible. Or to put it simply: strong single core and multi-core performance. Both. Not one. More cores =/= better performance across the board. Look at the 8350 bottlenecking top-end GPUs in SLI. And i7s also happen to murder AMD's 8cores in multitasking despite having half the number of cores. Why would they switch? Now if Zen actually delivers, Intel will have to consider 8cores. And they will battle on and on for performance supremacy. Which would make me very happy.

With Intel stubbornly sticking to 4 cores (unless you want to lose an arm and a leg in the deal), it seems to me AMD would find a good market with an 8-core CPU, provided the cores don't suck and are even relatively close to Intel's. AMD's prices have always been good, after all.

AMD supposedly has 2 "versions" of Zen coming. AMD is supposedly bringing ARM/RISC to the consumer market in a socketed form. They are also releasing an x86 version of Zen. Both will supposedly share a socket. For those upset about AMD releasing a new socket again (finally), it's because their (rumored) RISC based Zen architecture can't work with FM2(+) or AM3(+). AMD had to develop a new socket and entirely new chipsets to support both x86 and RISC processors. This would be, quite literally, a first in history. Both for a socketed RISC processor and an x86/RISC compatible chipset.

I'm happy that AMD seems to be coming with something that might perform well and I'll probably get it when it comes out if it's really good but I think FM2+ was disappointing. Maybe it was just my enthousiasm that lead me to think it wouldn't be, and I won't make the same mistake this time.. HSA didn't become a thing and won't be a thing for a long while, so I was hoping they'd at least release something so people who went for the FM2+ platform could have something a bit more performance-oriented while they wait for the next thing but in the end it'll be Kaveri/Godaveri till the end, so the FM2+ platform will never see anything performance oritented..

FM2 was never intended to be a "performance" platform. It's an entry-level/budget platform. With FM3, AMD is consolidating all markets on a single socket again. You should be happy that FM2 had a longer life-span than AM1, which only had 4 processors released for it: Athlon 5350, Athlon 5150, Sempron 3850 and Sempron 2650. AMD has no known plans to release any further processors using the AM1 socket. All AM1 processors are "SoC" designs based on the "Jaguar" architecture. The same architecture used in the PS4 and XBox One.