AMD Zen 2 based Pinnacle Ridge Planned for Early 2018, Zen 3 Also In Works
It’s only been a week since AMD released their Ryzen processors and we’re already hearing rumors about its successor. According to a new report from PCGamesHardware, the AMD Zen 2 based Pinnacle Ridge family will succeed the company’s current Summit Ridge processor lineup, and could launch in early 2018.
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AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 Already In Works, Expect up to 15% IPC Increment
Back at CES 2017, AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster stated that the new Zen architecture will last at least for four years. The company has already confirmed in its multi-generational roadmap that the current revision of Zen core would be followed up by Zen 2 and Zen 3 during this four year period.
AMD is actually using a leapfrog design which means they’ve got one team working on Zen 2, while there is another team that is working on Zen 3 at the same time. The company’s President and CEO Lisa Su said in a Reddit AMA:
“In new product development, you always learn a lot and we have our list of things that we are adding to Zen 2 and Zen 3 to get even more performance going forward.”
We’ll likely see an IPC (Instruction Per Cycle) increase moving from one generation of Zen to another. If you remember, AMD was originally looking for an IPC increment of about 40% over the previous Excavator technology. However, they managed to achieve a staggering 52% leap instead. So we can expect Zen follow-ups to come with IPC gains ranging from 5 to 15%.
Related: Ryzen 7 1800X Overclocked to 5.8GHz, Breaks Cinebench R15 World Record at 5.36GHz
AMD Zen 2 based Pinnacle Ridge to Arrive in Early 2018 After The Raven Ridge APU
According to the report, the Pinnacle Ridge lineup is planned for launch in early 2018. It would feature AMD Zen 2 cores offering even more performance for desktop and server users.
With Pinnacle Ridge, we could see a total of around 65% IPC increase over Excavator. Apart from IPC gains, AMD would also be looking to further optimize the chips for gaming applications and resolve issues they’re currently facing with Ryzen.
Prior to Pinnacle Ridge however, AMD would launch Raven Ridge in the second half of this year. Raven Ridge is AMD’s new APU based on the Zen architecture, with all SKUs being branded as Ryzen chips. The APU could also boast some enhancements that would later make it to the Zen 2 cores.
On GPU side, Raven Ridge will feature the latest Radeon Vega which would, of course, improve graphics power of the integrated chip. The APU will be primarily designed for notebooks, and could be priced around the $250 mark.