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AMD's new roadmaps offer some hints at how it’ll upgrade its CPUs in the coming years.
While AMD's strategy for servers and enterprise AI took center stage at a recent analyst day, AMD executives also previewed coming advancements to its CPU architecture.
(Credit: AMD)A presentation slide shows the company is planning its Zen 6 and the efficiency-focused version Zen 6c for next year. These chips will boast an "industry-first" 2-nanometer manufacturing process, likely from Taiwan's TSMC, which also produces M-series chips for Apple MacBooks.
The slide also indicates AMD is preparing a next-generation Zen 7, which will feature a mysterious new "matrix engine" while using a next-generation manufacturing node, possibly TSMC’s upcoming A16 node. AMD was vague about when the Zen 7 will launch, saying only that it will be sometime after 2026.
AMD CTO Mark Papermaster showed off the roadmap, but in the context of the company’s CPU chips for servers, the EPYC processor line. So we’ll need to wait and see what Zen 6 and Zen 7 will mean for desktop Ryzen CPUs.
(Credit: AMD)However, AMD's General Manager of Computing and Graphics Group, Jack Huynh, shared his own roadmap for the company’s laptop processors. The slide shows the company is preparing a new “Gorgon” chip for 2026 and then a “Medusa” chip for 2027, with a major goal of accelerating AI-workload performance. (That said, earlier leaks suggest Gorgon will use a Zen 5 CPU architecture, instead of Zen 6.)
"The future of AI PCs will be built on AMD," Huynh said in his presentation. The efforts promise a 3x+ boost the company’s PC and gaming-related revenue through 2030, another slide showed, which could steal market share from long-time rival Intel.
(Credit: AMD)"Targeting 40% client revenue market share over the next three to five years, following 50% growth year-over-year," the company added in a blog post.
However, Intel is preparing its own next-generation chips, including an upcoming desktop-focused Nova Lake CPU for next year. “With this lineup, we believe we will have the strongest PC portfolio in years,” Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, said last month.