Zen 5 chips now sampling

Yesterday's AMD earnings call came with both good and bad news for investors, but also with an official confirmation that Zen 5 chips are already reaching the tech giant's partners. The first-quarter results were positive and even slightly exceeded expectations thanks to data center revenue, which had managed to hit a new high. The second quarter revenue guidance, on the other hand, failed to impress. Unsurprisingly, the figures mentioned by Lisa Su promptly pushed AMD's stock down by over 10 percent. 

"We delivered strong first quarter results with our Data Center and Client segments each growing more than 80% year-over-year driven by the ramp of MI300 AI accelerator shipments and the adoption of our Ryzen and EPYC processors," said Su during her speech. She also highlighted that AMD's priorities for the remaining part of the year include ramping up the production of Instinct GPUs, gaining share with the new Epyc processors, as well as launching the next-gen Zen 5 processors for the PC and server markets.

The AMD Epyc Turin processors will launch as the first chips in the Epyc lineup to take advantage of the Zen 5 architecture. The first products to use them are currently being developed and should start reaching the market by the end of the year. According to AMD's CEO, there is a solid 30 percent increase when comparing the Turin platforms currently developed to the 4th generation Epyc platforms. The first Epyc processors arrived in 2017 and featured up to 32 first-generation Zen cores with 64 threads.

Also headed for the final clients in the second half of 2024, the AMD Ryzen Strix APU promises to bring together a Zen 5 CPU, an RDNA 3+ GPU, as well as XDNA 2 NPU cores. While this chip, expected to come in two variants (this still needs to be confirmed by AMD), will target the premium area of the market, mainstream and low-end offerings such as AMD Ryzen Kraken are expected to arrive next year.

Those interested in AMD processors already available on the market for a good price can currently grab the 8-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 5800X3D off Amazon for $308 instead of $449 thanks to a generous 31 percent discount.