Zen 5 Talked About During AMD Ryzen Processor Tech Talk

AMD has released a video that has John Taylor (Chief Marketing Officer), Suzanne Plummer (CVP Radeon Technologies Group), Michael Clark (Sr. Fellow Design Engineering), James Prior (Product Manager) and Christina Iron (Director, Global Campaigns) discussing the first year of Zen and where they are headed. Mr. Clark has been called the Chief Architect of Zen and he revealed during the video interview that Zen 5 development was underway!

AMDs processor roadmap that was most recently shown at CES 2018 only lists Zen 2 and Zen 3 designs. AMDs existing processors are based on Zen, with 2nd Generation Ryzen processors with Zen+, a refinement of that original architecture, expected to be released next week. AMD confirmed at CES 2018 that the Zen 2 design was completed and most expect to see Zen 2 come out in 2019 as the Zen+ ‘refresh’ is happening in Q2 2018. The move Zen 2 will usher in the era of 7nm for AMD in 2019 and we expect that AMD will tap GlobalFoundaries for manufacturing those wafers. AMD expects to roll out Zen 3 sometime in 2020 and it will be built on an improved 7nm process called 7nm+.

We aren’t sure what happened to Zen 4, but the number 4 is omitted in some Chinese buildings and is considered an unlucky number in Chinese because it is nearly homophonous to the word death. So, AMD is skipping Zen 4 and will be moving straight to Zen 5 after Zen 3 it appears. That means Zen 5 will be rolling out sometime after 2020. If everything goes as planned, the earliest we’d likely see Zen 5 would be 2021, but if there is such a thing as Zen 4 that could easily move it back to 2022 or later.

Check out the clip below!