Back in September Fudzilla wrote about the Gigabyte AM4 based B350 motherboard and it looks like Gigabyte won’t be alone in this game. ECS plans to make an m-ATX form factor board. B350 is one of the socket A4 chipset versions that supports the 7th Gen AMD APU.
The news comes when everyone waits to see the debut of Zen architecture. This is rumored to happen after CES, but we would not be surprised to see Zen based machines at CES 2017 in early January next year. After all, AMD’s CEO Lisa Su has already talked about an eight core, sixteen threads Summit Ridge processor and even showed it up and running at Computex 2016 in early June.
It looks like AMD plans to have three different tiers of Zen processors as the recent leaked roadmap lists them as the SR3, SR5 and SR7. I imagine that SR stands for Summit Ridge and that the 3, 5 and 7 are following Intel's branding scheme with Core i3, i5 and i7. It remains to be seen what the plan is for the final brands.
AMD, being AMD, is always a bit late as the original plan was to see the Zen desktop CPU in the Q4 2016 pretty much right now, but the latest information we managed to gather are pointing towards a Q1 2017 launch and possible CES showcase.
Zen and Summit Ridge, a desktop version of 14nm FinFET architecture, is extremely important to AMD, as this is the first time in a very long time that AMD will at least come closer to its Intel competition. AMD has a lot of supporters who want to buy its new Zen based platform as long as it is at least a bit more competitive to Intel’s. AMD doesn’t have to win against Intel, it just needs to come closer and possibly win some benchmarks to make its investors and its customers happy.