To remain competitive with Intel, AMD needs its upcoming Zen architecture to impress on both the performance and power side of things. If Zen is impressive, then it could mean great things for AMD. For the first time in recent memory, it'd actually be able to compete with Intel in key segments.

It's always hard to guess just how impressive a new launch is going to be; we can take the promises of companies, but all too often those fall flat. The latest rumors surrounding Zen, though, put the architecture in a great light.

New reports are showing that AMD could launch a Zen APU in 2019 that would contain 4 cores and 8 threads - and offer a power rating as low as 10W. Compound that with the fact that AMD is also going to be improving instructions-per-clock performance by about 40%, and this could really be a formidable contender.

Any way you look at it, 10W for a quad-core / eight-thread chip is downright impressive. The only downside here is that AMD can't deliver it sooner, but there's no major rush considering Intel is currently glued to 14nm, and these are AMD's plans for 7nm. That alone is a massive jump and would help AMD out even if it didn't make major IPC strides.

The 7nm chips from AMD will fall under the Gray Hawk codename, whereas next year, Raven Ridge-based chips are expected to launch. Those, like Intel's current crop, will be built on 14nm, and have an IGP based on Vega. Gray Hawk, by contrast, will have its GPU supplied by the Navi architecture.