AMD has officially announced an event called “New Horizon“, scheduled to take place on December 13th 2016. The event will be hosted by Geoff Keighley, the famous Canadian video game journalist and television presenter. The event is focused on providing an exclusive advance preview of AMD’s new Zen CPU, ahead of its 2017 Q1 launch.
The website mentions that there’ll be appearances from special guests during the event. eSports and Evil Geniuses legend PPD will put “Zen” through its paces. The company is also planning on having giveaways during the event. This is also the first time the public will be able to try the Zen CPU themselves and get a feel of what it’s truly capable of. Gamers wouldn’t want to miss this event!
The event will be streamed live on December 13, 2016. To sign up for livestream, head to the event page and fill in your First Name, Email address and other details. The event will go live at 3pm CST on December 13.
Product Launch Scheduled For January
While the event will give the public the opportunity to preview the Zen CPU capabilities, the product as such will be launched in January. AMD is all set to launch Zen Summit Ridge processors on January 17th, 2017, if rumors are to be believed. There are however rumors about March release. But, going by the company’s agenda, the March release will likely include the launch of more SKUs. One other way of adding weight to these rumors would be to expect AMD to announce details about Summit Ridge at CES 2017, the same venue where Intel will launch Kaby Lake desktop processors.
Summit Ridge processors will match the performance of Intel’s Core i7-6850K CPU. The Summit Ridge processors are optimized for around 3.15-3.30GHz base clock and 3.5GHz boost clock on FinFET process. The FinFET process is an extremely complicated, advanced technology node that is also extremely power-efficient and provides overall performance boost, the Summit Ridge can easily overclock to 4.2GHz. The clock speeds are based on collective information gathered from several sources/rumors and so need to taken with a pinch of salt. AMD’s Summit Ridge processors are likely to be priced around $250.