AMD to release Ryzen CPUs in March, Vega GPUs in Q2

AMD has announced during the presentation of its quarterly results that the shipment of AMD Ryzen processors will start in March. Video cards based on the new Vega architecture will have to wait until the second quarter of the year.

The Ryzen processors will hit the market at the beginning of March, says AMD CEO Lisa Su in an answer to a question posed during the presentation of the financial figures. There were already rumors that AMD will present its Ryzen processors at the end of February and then launch it at the beginning of March. That has now been confirmed. Details about which models AMD will release are not yet known. So far, the manufacturer has only demonstrated a processor with eight cores and sixteen threads.

Video cards with GPUs based on the Vega architecture will be on the market in the second quarter of this year. More specifically, AMD is not on the release date. In early January, AMD provided technical details about Vega’s architecture. Concrete details or prices of video cards based on the new chip are not yet available.

The Naples processors will also follow in the second quarter, which, like Ryzen, are based on the Zen architecture. The server processors come in variants with up to 32 cores. Zen-based laptop processors will then arrive in the second half of 2017. According to Lisa Su, the development of Ryzen, Naples and Vega is all going according to plan. The CEO emphasizes once again that AMD wants to make a return to the high-end segment with the new architectures.

AMD saw its revenue rise to $1.11 billion in the last quarter of 2016. A year earlier, that was $958 million. The increase was mainly due to good sales of Polaris GPUs. The revenue of the Computing and Graphics segment, which includes video cards, rose 28 percent year-on-year. AMD closed the quarter in the red, with a loss of 51 million dollars, converted about 47 million euros. This cut the loss in half compared to a year earlier.