AMD Ryzen CPUs Coming Early March 2017 & Vega GPUs Coming Q2 2017

Dr. Lisa Su during the AMD Q4/2016 Earnings Call said that Ryzen desktop processors will launch in early March and that it should do well in the high-end market. Multiple times on the call they mentioned that it would be happening in early March, so Ryzen isn’t too far off now. Since this was an earnings call it sounds like AMD wanted to make it clear that one month of Ryzen sales will be in that quarters revenue. The mobile version of this Zen-based processor is code named Raven Ridge and it is still on track for the second half of 2017. Dr. Su noted that AMD will improve margins as Summit Ridge and Vega ramp up as they are well above their corporate average for margin. She also slipped in that they are tinkering with the 7nm manufacturing process, so she might be talking about the rumored Zen+ ‘Gray Hawk’ APU that are rumored to launch sometime in 2019.

On the GPU side of things the AMD Vega GPU is progressing to plan and will be released in Q2 2017. AMD noted that they just had the highest graphics processing revenue in 11 quarters (close to three years) in the latest quarter. AMD saw double digit percentage growth of GPUs and it sounds like they will be happy to get the Vega architecture to market in the second quarter of 2017. AMD mentioned that Q1 is usually one that usually sees seasonal slowdown and noted that July/August/September/October should be big sales months as sales ramp up for the holidays.