This is a roadmap update and Mark Papermaster, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, has mentioned the Zen CPU core architecture.

He confirmed that Zen is coming in 2016. This is a completely new architecture driven by veteran Jim Keller, a proper CPU designer. Jim has been leading teams behind AMD K8 Athlon products and more recently, Apple A4 / A5 SoCs. It took his team two and a half years to improve the magical IPC (Instruction per clock).

The new Zen core supports SMT, Simultaneous Multi-Threading, and just as we said a while ago, it comes with new high bandwidth, low latency cache system.

It is an energy efficient FinFET design that scales from client to enterprise class. AMD didn't tell us that directly, but we do expect it to use 14nm GlobalFoundries technology.

Compared to the Excavator core, that powers soon to launch Carizzo APUs, Zen architecture has 40 percent faster Instruction per clock. This is a significant leap as Excavator is expected to have some 10 percent higher IPC compared to Steamroller cores.

After Zen, comes the Zen+ architecture but Papermaster was not ready to give out more details and just revealed that it will come with even higher instruction per clock.