AMD will be releasing its Zen 2 CPUs called Pinnacle Ridge by early 2018 which is expected to deliver a substantial boost in performance, new features and Instructions-per-Clock (IPC) gains over prior generation of CPUs. Already, newly-released AMD Ryzen processors already yield a 52 percent increase in IPC and experts expect an additional 5 to 15% improvement in the upcoming chip for as much as 65 percent increment over Excavator.

Last week, AMD just unveiled the three Ryzen 7 or Summit Ridge CPUs, which are based on a more revolutionary Zen architecture. It looks like the red team will not be taking any time off soon and will unveil several products in the coming months and years. PC Gamers Hardware gathered from a reliable source that Zen 2 or Pinnacle Ridge is already on the roadmap for a target release at the end of the year, but experts set a realistic timetable to early 2018.

Not much is known about AMD Pinnacle Ridge other than it will surely feature substantial gains in performance and IPC, which will be in increments of 5 to 15 percent. AMD president Dr. Lisa Su in a Reddit AMA reveals the company's commitment to keep on learning and apply all these to the Zen 2 and Zen 3 according to Tech52. This means that Zen 2 will usher in more gaming performance that enthusiasts and enterprise users will surely take an interest in according to wccftech.

However, gamers expect that AMD will be able to resolve the performance issues experienced by the new Ryzen CPUs before Pinnacle Ridge launches. These issues include the lack of or delayed optimization of the gaming application, compatibility with higher clocked DDR4 memory as well as deficient CPU clock speeds. Moreover, AMD could leverage on its existing process nodes with enhancements to produce better yields and chips that will be able to clock higher than existing SKUs. It is also important that AMD Pinnacle Ridge will be compatible with AM4 socket, which is a feature that AMD plans to keep for many years to come.

It will also work to AMD's advantage to enable the Pinnacle Ridge CPUs to be compatible with upgraded versions of the socket while ensuring Backwards Compatibility with early desktop chips from Zen 2 and Zen architecture. As to Zen 3, PC Gamers Hardware also revealed the Raven Ridge CPUs to be the first APU featuring the Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics cards also arriving in 2018. The Zen 3 SKU will have an array of quad-core variants that come with SMT enabled.

The current AMD Ryzen roadmap looks solid with Pinnacle Ridge and Raven Ridge pushing for higher clocked DDR4 RAM and reduced CPU clock speeds. All SKUs could capitalize on the existing 14nm FinFET technology where nodes give better yield-rates and chips can go extreme with its default clocks. AMD is well on its way to dominating the CPU market especially with a strong launch of its Ryzen 7 processors and amidst the troubles experienced by Intel with its 10nm node with poor yield results.