In the Q3 2016 earnings call AMD CEO Lisa Su reconfirms that ZEN based processors are on track to be released in Q1 2017. She makes mention of the 8-core Summit Ridge processors.
Su mentions that the company should see "higher than seasonal sales" in the first quarter of 2017 as wccftech spotted in the edited transcript of the conference call. She also mentions to expect that the processors will be able to compete with Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 processors.
Q3 2016 earnings call
Chris Hemmelgarn, Barclays Capital - Analyst
This is Chris Hemmelgarn on for Blaine. With Summit Ridge launching in Q1 of 2017, how would you expect the channel to ramp that? Do you see it ramping pretty fully in the first couple quarters of the year, or are you looking for more normal PC seasonality?
Lisa Su, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. - President and CEO
I would expect that there will be a relatively good initial demand for Summit Ridge, that may be not quite at the seasonal patterns. From where we see, Summit Ridge is playing in a space in the high end desktop, that we currently aren't offering a product. So we believe we'll be competitive certainly with Core i5 as well as Core i7, and we will be launching in those areas.
So I think our expectation is, we may ship some production samples in Q4, but the volume launch for desktop will be in Q1, and that's consistent with everything that we've planned into the business.
The 8-core Summit Ridge processor series from AMD will be the first ZEN based product series released to the desktop consumer market. The "Summit Ridge" Zen family will feature a unified AM4 socket with its GPU-equipped "Bristol Ridge" APU counterparts, and feature DDR4 support and a an expected 95W TDP. Though unconfirmed we expect each Zen core will have four integer units, two address generation units and four floating point units, and the decoder can decode four instructions per clock cycle. L1 data cache size is 32 KiB and L2 cache size 512 KiB per core. 2 CCUs = 2x8MB (L3) + 8x512KB (L2) = 20MB
Yesterday news leaked that new engineering samples Summit Ridge have been spotted, running clocks on the 8-core part well upwards to 3.3 GHz.
In a recent presenation AMD shows Summit Ridge to be faster compared to an octacore-Broadwell-E at the same clock frequency. The processors need a new motherboard based on Socket AM4 - these mainly will bring ZEN processors support for course, but also will evolve the PC infrastructure towards DDR4, NVMe M2 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 and sure, PCI Express 3.0 platform support.
AMD X370 Chipset (High-End)
So the most high-end chipset will be the X370 with that X for Extreme. This chipset will support Multi-GPU rendering (Crossfire and SLI) with two full x16 PCI Express slots (Gen 3.0). The chipset will support overclocking. Basically this is the chipset series you and yours truly will be after once Zen releases and yes you can expect a dandy overclocking software suite.
AMD B350 Chipset (Mainstream)
If it has a B in the naming schema, you should think mainstream and that B for Business. A more generalized chipset that offers full performance, yet less tweaking options and often less PCI-Express lanes available, the mainstream series. For B350 some specs already have leaked, next tot the 8x Gen 3 PCI-Express lanes, it'll add/hook another 6 Gen 2 lanes through the chipset and will offer a wide varyity of USB connectivity. This motherboard series will offer 2 channel DDR4 memory we assume up-to 2400 MHz.
AMD A320 Chipset (SSF/Budget)
Then there is the A320 and A300 series. These are intended for value, budget and small form factor products. This chipset will offer 4 PCI-e Gen 2 lanes with 1+2+6 (USB 3.1 Gen2, USB 3.1 Gen1, USB 2.0) support. A300 should be the chipset for SSF computers (like tiny home theater builds etc).
And with this round of chipsets AMD is to offer a complete range and line from top to bottom in the desktop PC segment, they are ready for ZEN alright.
