AMD's roadmap continues with the company confirming next-gen Zen 7 architecture, 2026 and 2027 Gorgon and Medusa processors, and giving a sneak peek at its next-gen PC graphics roadmap.
AMD held a financial analyst day Tuesday to talk about its business to investors and Wall Street analysts. Unfortunately, the agenda reflected AMD's new corporate priorities: with the bulk of AMD's revenue now coming from its data center business, AMD only scheduled twenty minutes for its client business. AMD CEO Lisa Su also called data centers “the most strategic business” for AMD.
However, before that happened, AMD also revealed some brief details about its architectural plans, with AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster announcing that AMD is working on Zen 7, the next generation processor architecture. This will serve as the basis for AMD's Ryzen processors, where Su said that in the desktop space, AMD controls more than 50 percent of the desktop CPU channel.
“We've released five generations of Zen processors,” Papermaster said. “We've broken it down into high-performance versions: a powerful and compact, cloud-optimized version that's also used in our networks, but they all maintain a consistent instruction set architecture. We've gone where no company has been willing to go with the bet we've made with chipsets.”
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AMD's Zen 5 architecture is the foundation of the Ryzen 9000 family. According to Papermaster, the Zen 6 architecture will debut in the next-generation EPYC server processor, which debuts this year.
Papermaster didn't say anything about Zen 7, although it did show it on a roadmap slide. (This slide also doesn't include an expected release date.) AMD continues to spread out its development teams, assigning one team to each architecture generation and moving back and forth. (This means the Zen 5 team is now moving on to work on Zen 7.) AMD also continues to develop two types of cores for each Zen architecture: one focused on performance and one focused on power.
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Papermaster also provided an early look at AMD's desktop graphics plans, although it didn't reveal many details. AMD is equally interested in improving the performance of its desktop GPUs as well as other peripheral applications that can leverage GPU computing.
Papermaster also showed off some of the improvements AMD is considering in its NPU roadmap. There, AMD plans to increase the number of AI TOPS and improve energy efficiency, without going into details.
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Jack Huynh, senior vice president leading the compute and graphics group at AMD, didn't go into detail, although he did indicate that AMD plans to expand into edge AI as well as the existing mobile, workstation and desktop markets.
However, he briefly showed a slide describing AMD's next-generation processor families: Gorgon and Medusa.
AMD recently began using the name of its processor family as a descriptor of sorts, adding a second noun to describe the chip's role: for example, “Strix Point” or “Strix Point.” Ryzen AI 300 Familyalong with the Strix Halo processor, also known as Ryzen AI Max. (AMD also released the Krackan Point as a mid-range Ryzen chip.)
Huynh also briefly showed off a slide showcasing AMD's 2026 and 2027 processors, including Gorgon and Medusa. This appears to confirm the earlier roadmap of Gorgon Point arriving in mid-range laptops in 2026, with the Medusa Point chip arriving as a replacement in 2027.
AMD
According to Huynh, AMD has a “no-compromise” PC strategy that embeds artificial intelligence into everything the company does. “The future of AI computing will be built on AMD.”
“We have made tremendous progress and have a clear path to market leadership,” Huynh said. “We are now entering a new era. AI is transforming the PC experience and redefining what computing is for every device in our portfolio. This is not just another product cycle, it is a unique generational shift aimed at expanding our capabilities in every segment. Our next chapter is about scaling the client business, deepening our advantages on the board, and ushering in new growth with AI at the edge. If I can leave you with one thought today, it is that we are poised to lead the era games and AI-PC.”
This story was updated with additional details at 2:44 pm PT.
