Rumour: AMD to launch Zen on 17th Jan with $300 price tag

January is approaching fast, which means we are very close to AMD's rumoured Zen launch. We have seen little pieces of information about AMD's upcoming 8 Core/16 Thread CPU over the last few months and this week, one of AMD's Chinese partners, MAXSUN, reportedly let it slip that we may see this chip launch on the 17th of January with a $300 price tag.

MAXSUN is a manufacturing company based in China. According to Techpowerup, they are set to help out in the creation of AM4 platform motherboards, which is how they would have got their hands on this information.

While most rumours have pointed to AMD showing off Zen at CES in January, the actual launch apparently won't be happening until two weeks later, on the 17th of January. However, a second release date is also listed, with a ‘second wave' set to hit in March 2017, indicating that perhaps Zen's January launch will be quite limited.

For Zen, AMD will apparently be adopting an SR3, SR5 and SR7 naming scheme, similar to Intel's i3, i5 and i7 lineup. The first CPU launch will be a high-end SR7 chip priced between $250 and $300, so it sounds like there is still some wiggle room there. According to the MAXSUN leak, this CPU will have a 3.3GHz base clock and a 3.5GHz boost, though apparently, 4.2GHz will be quite easy to achieve through overclocking.

While MAXSUN is said to have a hand in Zen's launch, this should all still be considered rumour, so take this news with a healthy dose of scepticism as it may not pan out.

KitGuru Says: Judging by the rumours and leaks, Zen appears to be shaping up nicely, though we won't have any final details until next year when AMD is ready to talk about it. Are any of you waiting on the Zen launch? What do you think of the potential pricing and specs?

Become a Patron!