AMD's CPU roadmap is relatively well understood at this point -- at least in name. We know that after Zen came Zen+, the Ryzen 2000 series, and after that comes Zen 2 in 2019, followed by Zen2+ in 2020. But what do those names actually mean? What kind of chips will we see released as part of those ranges? New rumors suggest AMD is interested in increasing core counts further.
WCCFTech reports that Zen 2's design has been finalized and that production will soon enter full swing, meaning that there shouldn't be any problems with the 3000 series AMD CPUs being released in the first half of 2019. In terms of what those chips will actually be like, we don't know anything for sure, but new rumors point to them being 12-16 core chips. That would bring them in line with some of the higher-end Threadripper and server-grade CPUs.
That kind of increased core count would mean that multi-threading will give users as many as 32 threads to work with, which would give these rumored chips an unprecedented level of mainstream, multitasking performance. High-end software like photo and video editing suites will be able to take huge advantage of such hardware, potentially giving AMD a real performance advantage over Intel chips.
That would complement the reduction in node size to 7nm, which will bring with it clock speed improvements and an increase in overall efficiency too, making them less power-hungry, even for AMD chips. 7nm is also the proposed size for that series' successor, Zen 3.
AMD is reportedly already working on successors to that generation too, with Zen 4 and even Zen 5, showing that AMD has plans well into the next decade of chip development.
