AMD will build another round of Zen CPUs on 14nm+ before jumping to ‘Zen 2’ and 7nm

This evening, AMD held a conference call to follow up and provide additional clarification to some of the announcements it made during the Financial Analyst meeting on Tuesday this week. During that event, AMD unveiled the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, alongside its forthcoming Threadripper and EPYC processors. However, GPU and CPU roadmaps were also updated, with AMD showing plans for Zen 2 and Zen 3 architecture. Before we get to future generations of Zen though, there will be an incremental update to the 14nm Ryzen CPUs currently on the market.

During the follow-up call this afternoon, AMD confirmed that it would be building another generation of Ryzen processors. However, next time around, they will be based on refined '14nm+' technology, likely paving the way for efficiency improvements and perhaps better clock speeds.

After that ‘incremental' update, AMD will begin focussing on ‘Zen 2', which is confirmed to be built on the 7nm process at Globalfoundries. Current estimates point to a 2019 date for 7nm. This will then later be followed up by ‘Zen 3', so AMD is set on the CPU front for the next several years.

In the meantime, the current iteration of Zen still has plenty of room to grow. We have Ryzen 7 and 5 already but later this year, the lineup will expand with Ryzen 3, Threadripper 16-core CPUs for HEDT systems and the 32-core EPYC SoC for data centres.

KitGuru Says: After being stuck with the FX-series for so long, it is nice to see that AMD has a healthy roadmap planned for future CPU launches over the next several years. Hopefully Zen will continue to remain competitive during that time. Have any of you made the jump to a Ryzen processor already? Are you holding out for future iterations? 

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