Guru3D got hold of a product list, which includes entries for AMD’s upcoming Zen architecture.

Four SKUs are thus rumored to exist:

  • Zen SR3: (65W, quad-core, eight threads, ~$150 USD)
  • Zen SR5: (95W, hexa-core, twelve threads, ~$250 USD)
  • Zen SR7: (95W, octo-core, sixteen threads, ~$350 USD)
  • Special Zen SR7: (95W, octo-core, sixteen threads, ~$500 USD)

The sheet also states that none of these are supposed to contain integrated graphics, like we see on the current FX line. There is some merit to using integrated GPUs for specific tasks, like processing video while the main GPU is busy or doing a rapid, massively parallel calculation without the latency of memory copies, but AMD is probably right to not waste resources, such as TDP, fighting our current lack of compatible software and viable use cases for these SKUs.

Image Credit: Guru3D

The sheet also contains benchmarks for Cinebench R15. While pre-rendered video is a task that really should be done on GPUs at this point, especially with permissive, strong, open-source projects like Cycles, they do provide a good example of multi-core performance that scales. In this one test, the Summit Ridge 7 CPU ($350) roughly matches the Intel Core i7-6850K ($600), again, according to this one unconfirmed benchmark. It doesn’t list clock rates, but other rumors claim that the top-end chip will be around 3.2 GHz base, 3.5 GHz boost at stock, with manual overclocks exceeding 4 GHz.

These performance figures suggest that Zen will not beat Skylake on single-threaded performance, but it might be close. That might not matter, however. CPUs, these days, are kind-of converging around a certain level of per-thread performance, and are differentiating with core count, price, and features. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been many leaks regarding enthusiast-level chipsets for Zen, so we don’t know if there will be compelling use cases yet.

Zen is expected early in 2017.