AMD’s Robert Hallock participated in an AMA on Reddit yesterday, and he gave some interesting details on the company’s upcoming products.
As the launch of AMD’s upcoming Polaris- and Zen-based products are still a ways off, Hallock was limited in the amount of information that he could disclose, but he was able to give us an update on the expected release dates for these components. Polaris is expected to launch first, sometime in mid 2016, with Zen following later this year.
With Zen, Hallock pointed out that AMD will be changing its processor release strategy. Starting with the Trinity APUs, AMD has been focused primarily on its APU products. Trinity used the Piledriver architecture, which was an updated form of Bulldozer, and subsequent FX CPUs used Piledriver as well. Since then, AMD has released APUs using several other architectures, including an improved Piledriver architecture (Richland), Steamroller (Kaveri) and Excavator (Carrizo), but it has not pushed a new core in the desktop FX product line.
When Zen comes, however, it will first be released in the FX product line starting sometime in late 2016. APUs using Zen will arrive later. Hallock also commented that all of the CPUs and GPUs coming from AMD in the near future will use GlobalFoundries 14 nm FinFET transistor technology, which in and of itself should help AMD to significantly improve its power consumption and performance and become more competitive against Intel and Nvidia in addition. That is, of course, in addition to whatever architectural enhancements AMD is able to make.
As the year rolls on, we should be seeing more about these upcoming products soon.
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