AMD's next-generation 14nm Ryzen series processors will be officially released at the end of February and the first motherboards compatible with the new platform are coming in March.

The first information about the AMD Ryzen has raised plenty of hopes among PC enthusiasts. The initial official unveiling provided enough information for people to get their teeth into and believe in a return to the glory days of AMD CPUs.

And if this brief review of a Ryzen engineering sample processor is to be trusted, the new CPU looks very promising. The review of the French PC hardware print magazine Canard PC examines the octacore AMD Ryzen ES upon a beta motherboard. This processor is one of four ES processors distributed by AMD to its hardware partners, and it seems to run at conservative clock speeds. The Canard PC sample was clocked at base/boost of 3.15/3.4GHz. Note that AMD announced that top-end shipping Ryzen chips would have a 3.4GHz base clock. Despite the ES constrained clock speeds and beta motherboard the AMD processor did it pretty well overall. In gaming it seems to lose some ground, and the overall consumption of the chip was about 93W.

PC motherboard makers in Taiwan are optimistic about the high price/performance ratio of the Rizen platform, and they will offer a range of products with high-end X370, mainstream B350 and entry-level A320 chipsets from AMD, plus ASMedia I/O controllers.

Alongside the positive sentiment for upcoming Ryzen products, there is also optimism with regard to the AMD GPU business. AMD Polaris is making an impact and with strong demand seen, and the upcoming Vega GPUs are expected to keep fuelling AMD's momentum.