AMD Ryzen Expected To Last 4 Years; Hard Launch, Lifespan, Overclocking Plans And More Details Unveiled [VIDEO]

AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster at CES has revealed additional details regarding the company's upcoming Ryzen series of CPUs. The details such as the fact that it'll keep Ryzen around for at least four years, roughly the same amount of time AMD spent developing its Zen micro architecture

First things first. AMD is promising a hard launch for Ryzen, without any paper launches, limited availability, or limited product introductions. When Zen will debut it will debut in multiple, still unknown, configurations and not a single eight-core part.

According to PC World, Papermaster has also confirmed the four-year target and emphasized that it didn't mean AMD wouldn't iterate the core. "We're not going tick-tock," Papermaster said. "Zen is going to be tock, tock, tock."

There are several ways to read this sentence. Tick-tock refers to Intel's previous practice of introducing new CPU architectures in one product cycle and new manufacturing nodes in the other.

AMD has never strictly arranged an equivalent approach over multiple product cycles. We can conclude that Papermaster is saying AMD won't deploy Zen on new manufacturing nodes over time. But that AMD intends to implement an aggressive series of tweaks and improvements to the current core as time goes by.

There's a significant lag between when a design strips out and when it ships to consumers. This means AMD's CPU design team is almost certainly hard at work on Zen's successor already, even though Zen hasn't actually shipped yet, according to Extreme Tech.

Meanwhile, PCWorld's Brad Chacos reports on some interesting news on the overclocking front shows that all AMD Ryzen CPUs will be unlocked and overclockable, but only three motherboard chipsets, that are X370, X300, and B350, which will have overclocking support.

Crossfire and SLI support will only be implemented on the X370. According to AMD, the relative handfuls of people who use multi-GPUs always use higher-end motherboards.