Finally we have clear picture about the upcoming AMD processors. AMD Zen is on its way, as 8-core chips are prepared for mass production. Apparently only 8-core/16 thread processors will be made on 14nm technology this year, some of which will have one (defective) locked module in order to obtain cheaper, 6-core CPUs. Yes, the first Zen chips will only be CPUs, without integrated graphics.
At launch, the AM4 platform will not have dual core and quad core Zen processors - instead 28nm Bristol Ridge APUs will address the low-end to mid-range market. Some of these APUs will most likely come with disabled/defective integrated graphics, in order to keep the low-end gaming market, held today by AMD Athlon X4 FM2+
processors, which are significantly cheaper than the APUs (and Intel CPUs) with the same performance.
The web page for FreeSync has been updated. Thanks to the latest changes, users can choose and match FreeSync enabled video cards and APUs with compatible FreeSync monitors. This compatibility factor is mostly about frame rate, as not all GPUs have the horsepower for high frame rates and not all FreeSync monitors do the sync at both low and high frame rates.
In the beginning FreeSync was only available on the DisplayPort interface, but now AMD in collaboration with Acer, LG and Samsung are expanding compatibility to HDMI too, because it's the most common (and practical) interface.
nVidia recently launched the Geforce GTX 1080, which will be faster than the Titan X and will only cost 699 USD for the founder edition (aka. reference card) or MSRP 599 USD for cards made by other manufacturers (ASUS, Gigabyte, EVGA...etc.) with different coolers.
It's unclear at this time what's the intention behind this pricing difference, but we'll know for sure after the NDA is lifted, later this month, and all the reviewers will publish the results of their tests.
So ... AMD is a funny situation, because nVidia just spent around 2 billion USD on the development of the GTX 1080, which doesn't even use HBM or HBM2, just 8GB GDDR5X. There's no information about how much AMD is spending on research and development, but 14nm AMD Polaris 10/11 GPUs will be launched later this month, which will be in the "efficient + VR Ready" class (R9 290/390 level performance) at a low price point. However, these won't come close in performance to what nVidia -supposedly- made with GDDR5X.
It is rumored that AMD's response to these really fast nVidia cards will be the Vega generation with HBM2, launched much earlier than expected - before the end of the year. It'll be interesting to see reinvigorated competition between these two, after relatively boring year for PC hardware.
In other news, AMD launched a more affordable line of AMD Radeon R3
desktop/laptop SSDs. They are already in stores for about the same price as Kingston SSDs (at first glance). Write speed on the 120GB model is at 360MB/s, while the 240GB and 480GB models write at up to 470MB/s. Read speed is 520MB/s for all three models, but we can expect slight differences in benchmarks.