AMD teases next-gen 'Pinnacle Ridge' CPU for early 2018

AMD has well and truly shaken up the CPU market with the release of Ryzen processors, led by the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X. Now that Ryzen is here, we're already hearing about Zen 2 - which will be known as Pinnacle Ridge.

The current Ryzen family of CPUs is known as Summit Ridge, but Zen 2 and Zen 3 should deliver better IPC performance, new features, and other goodies. Ryzen in its first-gen appearance had a 52% IPC (Instructions Per Clock) over the previous generation AMD CPU architecture - while Zen 2 and Zen 3 should deliver 5-15% improvements in IPC.

During a recent AMA on Reddit, AMD CEO Lisa Su said: "In new product development, you always learn a lot and we have our list of thingsthat we are adding to zen2 and zen3 to get even more performance going forward".

AMD's new AM4 socket, that takes Ryzen, will take Zen 2 and Zen 3 processors in the future. Better yet, we're looking at up to 65% more IPC improvements over the older Excavator CPU architecture, with the aim of Zen 2 and 3 featuring support for higher clocked DDR4 RAM and lower CPU clock speeds. AMD will continue to nail the 14nm FinFET process, so we should expect the nodes to continue with better yields, and chips that have higher default clock speeds thanks to the refinements along the way.