We're beginning to see how the Zen architecture will affect AMD's entire product stack. This news refers to their Opteron line of CPUs, which are intended for servers and certain workstations. They tend to allow lots of memory, have lots of cores, and connect to a lot of I/O options and add-in boards at the same time.

In this case, Zen-based Opterons will be available in two, four, sixteen, and thirty-two core options, with two threads per core (yielding four, eight, thirty-two, and sixty-four threads, respectively). TDPs will range between 35W and 180W. Intel's Xeon E7 v4 goes up to 165W got 24 cores (on Broadwell-EX) so AMD has a little more headroom to play with for those extra eight cores. That is obviously a lot, and it should be, again, good for cloud applications that can be parallelized.

As for the I/O side of things, the rumored chip will have 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes. It's unclear whether that is per socket, or total. Its wording sounds like it is per-CPU, although much earlier rumors have said that it has 64 PCIe lanes per socket with dual-socket boards available. It will also support sixteen 10-Gigabit Ethernet connections, which, again, is great for servers, especially with virtualization.

These are expected to launch in 2017. Fudzilla claims that “very late 2016” is possible, but also that it will launch after high-end desktop, which are expected to be delayed until 2017.