AMD's next-gen Zen CPUs could be called Ryzen

AMD has been working on its next-gen Zen architecture for years now, and the more we hear about it - the more excited we become. It looks like the 'SR7' chip will be priced at $499 and provide performance levels of Intel's $999 chip in the Core i7-5960X.

But, we still don't know what AMD will call their new CPUs... until now. After digging around on Reddit, I stumbled across something very revealing: AMD has trademarked a bunch of new product names, starting with Ryzen. There are other names as well, with ThreadRipper sounding pretty awesome - and I'm sure it'll arrive as a freshly-powered HyperThreading competitor on the 16-threaded Zen CPU that's priced at $499.

AMD has trademarked the following names:

• Ryzen
• ThreadRipper
• Grok
• Vara
• Joro
• Jitzu

We don't know anything else right now, but I feel confident that this is not a rumor, and that Ryzen, ThreadRipper, and the rest of the very 'out there' names are real. It is an edgy marketing plan for AMD, but Zen has enough behind it to make it happen.

I also wrote a new Vega GPU architecture article recently, if you want to see what's happening on the GPU side of AMD.