The rumour mill has powered back up this week, bringing us information regarding AMD's future AM4 socket motherboards, which could launch as early as March next year, according to new reports. The new socket will support AMD's upcoming Zen processors, along with Bristol Ridge APUs, it will also bring along full DDR4 RAM support, amongst other platform improvements.
The new information comes from German tech site, Planet3DNow, so do keep that in mind as we have no way of verifying their source. In the report, the site reaches out to a motherboard manufacturer and was told that the internal timetable for AM4's launch is currently March 2016, which is earlier than previously anticipated.
It is worth noting that Socket AM4 will support both future FX CPUs and APUs, so while AM4 motherboards may arrive as early as March, Zen won't be ready until Q4 next year, so we will only see APUs taking advantage of the new platform features until then.
That said, we have heard plenty of talk about Zen in recent weeks, with previous reports claiming that the CPU has already been taped out and met all internal performance expectations, with no bottlenecks.
KitGuru Says: Some people have been waiting on the launch of Zen for a very long time. However, this Socket AM4 news is also exciting for APU users as well, as it means AMD will be launching a motherboard platform that will be more on-par with Intel's current desktop offerings pretty soon.
The Bristol Ridge APU is being released next spring, it uses the AM4 socket but is based on Excavator (Bulldozer) not Zen so it’s really not that exciting. We will still have to wait till Autumn 2017 for Zen if it is released on time.
Zen fx chips are to be released in Q4 2016 and apus in 2017. This makes upgrading of bristol ridge apus easy. Hence this is exciting news.
Eff that. I’m super excited to hear about the new mobos. Still running a crosshair IV formula (AM3) from AMD with a vishera chip. I want to know.
AM4 will power Bristol Ridge and Zen.
I would like to know what the price point will be for the new AM4 chips?