AMD's next-generation Zen architecture is expected to arrive not earlier than the fourth quarter of 2016, in what could be a rather late arrival for the company in order to maintain a competitive position. Seeing PC demand remaining weak and its server, embedded and tablet product shipments failing to achieve major growth, AMD reported losses of US$360 million for the first half of 2015.

Sources in Taiwan believe Zen architecture's late release is due to Globalfoundries' issues with R&D and yield rates for its 14nm FinFET manufacturing process.

The Zen architecture is expected to achieve a 40% improvement in performance compared to AMD's existing x86 architecture and will be able to support simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). The new architecture also adopts a new cache subsystem to boost CPU efficiency.