AMD has officially announceda special preview event on December 13th for its upcoming Zen CPUs. The event, titled "New Horizon", will take place in Austin Texas and will be hosted by gaming journalist Geoff Keighley. The event will also be livestreamed.

The company is promising an exclusive preview of its highly anticipated next generation high-end Zen processors. AMDhas also announcedthat this will be the very first time that the public will be able to get a hands-on experience with its new chips. The company has expressed excitement in allowing peopleto get a true sense ofwhat Zen CPUs arecapable of and run them through the paces before the official product launch in early 2017.

Zen, AMD’s Most Important ProductIn More Than A Decade

Many Years In The making

Zen has been one of AMD’s most eagerlyanticipated products for as far as I can remember. It’s the company’s first attempt to compete at the high-end, enthusiast, CPU market since the introduction of the Bulldozer microarchitecturefive years ago. Zen breaks new ground for AMD in many ways. It’s thecompany’s first ever CPU architecture to feature simultaneous multithreading.It’s alsothe very first productfor AMD to be built on a process technology that’s very close toparity with Intel since the days of the original Athlonmore than a decade ago.

This fact alone is huge. It means that forthe very first time since the early 2000s AMD’s CPU products won’t be at an inherent disadvantage due to Intel’s process lead. From an architectural point of view Zen is a brand new clean-slate design that’s been led from the get-go by accomplished CPU architect Jim Keller. The very same engineerthat played a pivotal role in designingthe original Athlon XP and Athlon64 processors.The most competitive CPUproductsinthe history of the company. It's without a doubt that Zen is AMD’s biggest long-term technology bet and one of the largest engineering efforts undertaken by the company to date.

AMD Zen CPUs Getting Exclusive Preview On December 13th, Product Launch In January

An exclusive preview of AMD’s new “Zen” CPU

Join AMD at New Horizon on 12/13 at 3pm CST for an exclusive advance preview of our new “Zen” CPU ahead of its 2017 Q1 release. New Horizon is AMD’s fan-focused event, designed to engage our most dedicated customers.

As well as a hands-on preview of the power of “Zen”, attendees will be able to talk to the AMD minds behind the chip itself and grab expert gaming advice from eSports & Evil Geniuses legend PPD.

The event is hosted by industry veteran Geoff Keighley, who’ll introduce special guests throughout the day.

Last week we covered a significant development regarding the company's incredibly impressive flagship "SR7" 8 core, 16 thread chip. An engineering sample of the new processor with a 3.5Ghz turbo clock speed was spotted recently and it is believed that the first ever Zen product to launch would be based on this same very chip. This 8 core SR7 Zen flagship is rumored to launch at an MSRP of $499 and give Intel's $999 i7 5960X 8 core Haswell-E chip a run for its money in terms of performance.

The Zen Summit Ridge Family Of EnthusiastDesktop CPUs

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The Summit Ridge family of desktop Zen CPUs will debut next year at CES in January with on-shelf availability expected approximately a week later. The new CPU launch will be accompanied by a plethora of new high-end "X370" motherboards.We've laid out the feature set of Zen and AMD's brand new X370 chipset and AM4 platform in detail, all of which you can find here.If you're interested in the Zen microarchitecture itself, we've got you covered in our deep-dive architectural break-downbased on AMD's Hotchips presentation & the information released at Zen's performance demo event.

All Zen Summit Ridge CPUs that are part of the Summit Ridge family will include the company’s new platform security processor, PCIe 3.0 support, dual channel DDR4 memory controllers, copious amounts of L3 cache and updated storage features. Including USB3.1 and NVMe. Summit Ridge will include CPUs ranging from8 cores & 16 threadsto4 cores & 8 threads with 95-65 watts of power.

AMD RYZEN Desktop CPU Lineup - Specs & Rumored Prices

AM4 X370 "Promontory" Chipset

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The X370 Promontory chipset is the highest-end AM4 chipset and the most feature-packed ofthe bunch. Summit Ridge & Bristol Ridge CPUs & APUs sharepin to pin compatibility on the AM4 socket.If you're planning to build a Summit Ridge based build this will likely your best way to go. Accompanying the X370 chipsetthere will also be two other for the mid-range and entry-level options in the form of the"B350" and "A320".

AM4’s Key Features

DDR4 MemoryPCIe Gen 3USB 3.1 Gen2 10GbpsNVMeSATA Express