AMD Zen SR7 Processors Coming January 17th, 2017 and Capable of 5GHz Clock Speeds

By Nathan Kirsch

Will AMD Zen processors be coming to market on January 17th, 2017? According to leaked slides from Asia, it appears that AMD will be launching their high-end AMD Zen SR7 processors first and in less than two months! That means we will likely see AMD lift the embargo on the series at CES 2017 in Las Vegas. The AMD Zen SR7 processors will be arriving first and prices will be starting out at $219 USD. AMD is expected to release the lower cost Zen SR5 and Zen SR3 processors in March 2017.

The leaked slide from ChipHell (shown below) appears to show that all AMD Zen processors may be above RMB1500 (renminbi) or $219 USB and rumors have the flagship parts at RMB1500 or $450 USD. The three ‘SR’ series processors are all part of the Summit Ridge processor series and that is AMD’s top High-End Desktop (HEDT) processor family. It appears that AMD is copying the Intel Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 nomenclature as they just happen to have three performance classes (low-end, mid-range and high-end) for Summit Ridge called SR3, SR5 and SR7.

AMD Zen Processor Pricing

The Zen SR7 processors will feature 8 physical cores with 16 threads and will be compatible with the AMD AM4 motherboard platform that features DDR4 and all the latest bells and whistles. The AMD Zen SR7 has a 95W TDP rating, but there are rumors of more power efficient parts out there. According information released by Maxsun and posts on Baidu, the AMD Zen SR7 will have base clock speeds of 3.15-3.30 GHz with 3.5 GHz boost clocks. AMD SR7 processors also appear to be decent overclockers with 4.2 GHz being achievable fairly easily with an enthusiast CPU cooler and with exotic LN2 cooling you should be able to get up to 5 GHz!

AMD Zen SR7

AMD will be releasing A320, B350 and X370 motherboard chipsets for the AM4 platform and you’ll need to have the right board to get good overclocks. The AMD A320 doesn’t support overclocking, the AMD B350 does to some extent and then the AMD X370 is the flagship chipset for AM4 and supports enhanced overclocking and has two x16 motherboard slots for AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU configurations.

AMD X370 Chipset

The AMD Zen SR7 should be able to compete with Intel Core i7 parts that cost substantially more. According to Maxsun the AMD Zen SR7 (8C/16T) was able to perform on par with the Intel Core i7-6850K (6C/12T) in the Cinebench rendering benchmark. This news isn’t too shocking as AMD previously disclosed and demonstrated that a Zen engineering sample had comparable performance to an Intel Core i7 Broadwell-E 8C/16T processor, in Blender when both were run at the same clock speed.

All this information is based on leaks and rumors, so be sure to take it all with a grain of salt and we are sure more information will leak out as we get closer to January! Right now AMD Zen SR7 with an AMD X370 platform has managed to get our attention and we are excited to see what AMD will officially announce!