Rumor: Laptops with AMD Zen processors coming in second half of 2017

Laptops with processors based on AMD’s Zen architecture are reportedly set to appear in the second half of 2017. AMD is set to serve the desktop in early 2017 and not bring the frugal chips to laptops until later in the year.

That writes Wccftech, which relies on sources who would be familiar with the matter. The mobile version of the Zen generation will bear the name Raven Ridge, have a TDP between 4 and 35 watts, be produced at 14nm and support high bandwidth memory for the GPU. With an appearance for laptops in the second half of 2017, AMD is deviating from Intel’s strategy: that competitor is now bringing its Kaby Lake generation to energy-efficient laptops and only to desktops in early 2017.

The Zen architecture is AMD’s first completely new architecture since Bulldozer, which came to market in 2011. AMD promises to make a leap forward with Zen in terms of performance and consumption and indicates that the new processors should be able to compete in terms of instructions per cycle with Intel processors. The chip manufacturer previously demonstrated this with a Blender benchmark in which an AMD Zen octacore processor achieved a similar result to an Intel Broadwell octacore running at the same clock speed.

Last week it was already announced that the Zen desktop processors will hit the market in February 2017, accompanied by a new X370 motherboard chipset.