AMD's long-awaited line of Zen processors will indeed be arriving for high-end PCs later next year, fans of the Intel alternative will doubtless be pleased to hear.
It's hoped that Zen CPUs will bring AMD back on a more competitive footing with Intel, and confirmation of the launch was reported by WCCF Tech, coming courtesy of AMD's chief financial officer, Devinder Kumar (a stalwart of the company who has worked there for over three decades).
At the Raymond James Technology Investors Conference, Kumar said that AMD would introduce high-end desktop FX processors of the Zen variety next year.
He noted: "I think the key is getting through 2016 is to continue to stabilise the computing and graphics business, commercial, professional graphics embedded and even the high-end desktops with the Zen Core should all be accretive from a margin standpoint."
Expectations for the processor are certainly high, and last month AMD insisted that during testing these CPUs have met all expectations. Zen boasts a high-performance core design, and Zen cores can apparently handle 40% more instructions per clock than the current Excavator cores.
Zen (which will use the company's AM4 platform) is apparently nicely compact and efficient when it comes to power consumption too, and CPUs will come in four, six and eight-core flavours. They will also use a high bandwidth, low latency cache system.
The big chunky FX desktop processors will be the first out of the door, and will eventually be followed by the likes of new APUs and cheaper offerings in general.
