We have known for months that AMD plans to introduce a new x86 CPU architecture, codenamed Zen next year. A year is a long time period, though, so we can expect the chip to come out even in January 2016, which is a few months away. Unfortunately this is what will NOT happen as it seems Zen will arrive a full year from now – in Q4 2016.
Of course this is bad news for AMD and AMD fans around the world but what’s even worse is that the late arrival of the new chip architecture will almost surely not help AMD compete. Instead it might put the company in a rather difficult competing position amidst falling global PC sales – a trend that has been around for years. The problem with Zen is not likely connected with AMD or the chip – instead it is GlobalFoundries that has problems with manufacturing the chip due to the brand new and yet unpolished 14 nm FinFET production process.
There’s some hope though – AMD says Zen will come with 40 per cent better performance comparing to the current FX chip generation and there will also be simultaneous multi-threading as well as a new cache subsystem to boost performance. Given that Intel also does not bring much more performance in its latest CPU generations, AMD has all chances to catch up with the blue US chip maker and even beat it.
Source: Digitimes.com