Lisa Su, CEO of AMD said that the chip maker is in conversations with PC makers to use Zen-based chips, code-named Summit Ridge. The plan, as she sees it is that the Zen processor architecture will first come to high-end desktops like gaming PCs at the end of this year.

Early next year, Zen chips will be in servers. There's no word on when Zen would be introduced in laptops or PCs which belong to ordinary people.

AMD wants people to combine Zen with its GPUs based on the Polaris architecture, which will ship mid-year which made many suspect that the CPU would be with us sooner rather than later.

However on that road map, Zen will not make any serious inroads into Intel’s market share until 2017.

AMD already offers FX chips with up to eight cores for gamers, and Summit Ridge will likely be sold under that brand. The desktop chips will have a high-core count and support the latest DDR4 memory, AMD has said.

AMD needs to target its gaming and home builder desktop market which it started to lose when Intel started allowing its Core chips to be overclocked .

Su said that the Summit Ridge chips would be a "re-entry" into the high-performance desktop market.

A Zen-based CPU offers a performance uplift of 40 percent per cycle than Excavator CPU cores, which are in current chips code-named Carrizo, Su said.

AMD's PC business has been performing poorly. Due to a decline in PC shipments, revenue for AMD's Computing and Graphics revenue -- which deals in PC and graphics chips -- declined to US$470 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 compared to $662 million in the same quarter a year ago.

AMD reported a net loss of $79 million in the fourth quarter, compared to a profit of $18 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company reported revenue of $958 million, declining from $1.24 billion.  So bascally AMD is signing up for a year of more misery before Zen arrives.