Details about AMD's Ryzen have been trickling out for months, but AMD has kept quiet about when, exactly, the chip would debut. We still don't know precisely when the core will hit store shelves, but we do have a maximum date -- AMD appears to be planning to launch the chip at the end of February or the very beginning of March, at most. These details are courtesy of AMD's own GDC session plans. While AMD has edited their invitation to remove all reference to Ryzen, eagle-eyed folks managed to screencap the information first. GDC, the event discussed below, runs from February 27 to March 3.
Hat tip to Overclockers3D(Opens in a new window), who noticed the invitation and screencapped the Ryzen invitation. The late February target for Ryzen matches what we've seen rumored around the 'Net. It also makes sense in context of AMD's previous statements about targeting a Q1 date. Late February to early March is solidly within Q1, far enough away that they're obviously finalizing details post-CES, but soon enough that it could make at least a small impact on the company's Q1 2017 income.
Ryzen is generally expected to offer far better competition for Intel's Core family of products than anything AMD has launched in the past five years, since its Bulldozer architecture debuted. The rollout, however, won't happen all at once. First out the gate will be desktop parts, doubtlessly intended to spark enthusiast conversation and uptake. Later this year, AMD will launch server chips for revenue, with rumors of up to 32-cores and eight-channel memory configurations at the highest end (all of these plans are unconfirmed as of this writing). Its timeframe for an APU rollout is less certain, but we can safely conclude that AMD won't leave its lackluster Excavator APUs on the market one jot longer than it has to. The company did a fine job as far as overhauling Bulldozer from a 125W part to a chip that could fit into 15W power envelopes, but remember -- AMD's original stated reason for why it built Brazos and Bulldozer, once upon a time, was so it could hit both the low-power and higher-performance markets.
We expect to see more details on these cores and markets as 2017 progresses. If Ryzen is shipping in the next 6-8 weeks, anyone planning an upgrade may be best-served by waiting and seeing how Intel and AMD compare. Intel has already adjusted its Pentium configurations and pricing, but this remains fairly small potatoes. Most enthusiasts are hoping AMD's hardware is good enough to force Intel to bring prices down on its six-core or eight-core parts. Even if you don't intend to buy AMD, better competition in the CPU market would be beneficial for all of us.
