AMD Zen release date update: AMD launching Ryzen CPU around Game Developer Conference 2017 in March

The new Ryzen CPUs will be making their debut at the Game Developer Conference 2017, in March, it is being reported.  And there are lots of rumors going around to whet the appetite of PC gamers.

According to the Ecumenical News, there will be a presentation at the GDC on "Optimizing for AMD Ryzen CPU" to be led by Developer Technology Engineers Ken Mitchell and Elliot Kim. 

The AMD Game Engineering team members will introduce the recently launched AMD Ryzen CPU and discuss advanced optimization topics, as well as share on the Zen microarchitecture and "code optimization opportunities using hardware performance-monitoring counters."

With GDC 2017 running from February 27 to March 3, Ryzen's release date is just around the corner, which would fall in line with AMD's previous promise to make it available in Q1 of 2017 when it unveiled Ryzen at the end of last year.

AMD will be hoping its new CPU can claw back some of the market share it has lost in recent years to Intel.  AMD is confident in its new product, as its "New Horizons" livestream showed the Ryzen chip performing faster than the Broadwell-E chip.  

AM4 supports DDR4, PCIe Gen. 3, USB 3.1 Gen. 2, NVMe, and SATA Express technologies.   During a demo at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, AMD showcased a third revision of the flagship with a base clock speed of 3.6GHz and the capacity to turbo up to 3.9GHz.

However, according to PC GamesN, the quad-core Ryzen processor will not support Simultaneous Multi-Threading.

The website puts the price tag at around the $500 mark, which is extra exciting as the Intel CPU will set gamers back at least $1,000.  The slower octo-core version is expected to be around $350.