AMD confirms Zen 7 CPU plans, offers look at GPU, NPU roadmap

AMD’s roadmap marches on: the company confirmed the presence of its next-generation Zen 7 architecture, its “Gorgon” and “Medusa” 2026 and 2027 processors, and talked briefly about the company’s next-generation PC graphics roadmap as well.

AMD hosted a day for financial analysts on Tuesday, outlining its businesses for a cadre of Wall Street investors and analysts. Unfortunately, the agenda reflected AMD’s new corporate priorities: with the bulk of AMD’s revenue now coming from its datacenter business, AMD scheduled just twenty minutes for its client businesses. AMD chief executive Lisa Su also identified the datacenter as “the most strategic business” for AMD.

Before it did, however, AMD also revealed some brief details of its architectural roadmaps., where AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster announced that AMD was working on Zen 7, its next-generation CPU architecture. That will underpin AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, where in the desktop Su said that AMD commands over 50 percent of the desktop CPU channel.

“We’ve delivered five generations of the Zen CPU,” Papermaster said. “We split it into high performance versions, power and compact, cloud optimized version also used in our networks, but all maintaining a consistency of instruction set architecture. We went where no company was willing to go in the bet we made with chiplets.”

Mark Hachman / Foundry

AMD’s Zen 5 architecture is the foundation of the Ryzen 9000 family. The Zen 6 architecture will debut in the company’s next-gen EPYC processor for servers, debuting this year, Papermaster said.

Papermaster didn’t say anything about Zen 7, though he showed it on a roadmap slide. (That slide didn’t include an estimated ship date, either.) AMD continues to stagger its design teams, assigning one team to each architecture generation and going back and forth. (That means that the Zen 5 team is now shifting to work on Zen 7.) AMD also continues to develop two types of cores for each Zen architecture, one focusing on performance and the other focusing on power.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Papermaster also provided an early look at AMD’s desktop graphics roadmap, though without revealing many details. AMD is equally interested in improving the performance of its desktop GPUs as well as other edge applications where it can apply GPU compute.

Papermaster also showed off some of the improvements AMD is considering for its NPU roadmap as well. There, AMD plans more AI TOPS and more power efficiency, without going into details.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Jack Huynh, the senior vice president who heads the Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, did not go into additional details, though he did indicate that AMD plans to move into edge AI as well as its existing markets in the mobile, workstation, and desktop markets.

He did, however, briefly show a slide outlining AMD’s next-generation processor families: “Gorgon,” and “Medusa.”

AMD has recently begun using the processor family name as a descriptor of sorts, tacking on a second noun to describe the role of the chip: think “Strix Point,” or the Ryzen AI 300 family, alongside the “Strix Halo” processor, aka the Ryzen AI Max. (AMD also launched Krackan Point as a mid-tier Ryzen chip.)

Huynh also briefly showed a slide showing off AMD’s 2026 and 2027 processors, too: including Gorgon and Medusa. That appears to confirm an earlier roadmap that showed “Gorgon Point” appearing in midrange notebooks in 2026 and a “Medusa Point” chip showing up in as a replacement in 2027.

AMD

AMD has a “no compromise” PC strategy, Huynh said, infusing AI into everything the company does. “The future of AI PCs will be built on AMD.”

“We’ve built tremendous momentum, and we have a clear path to market leadership,” Huynh said. “Now we’re entering a new era. AI is transforming the PC experience and redefining what compute means across every device in our portfolio. This is not just another product cycle, it’s a once in a generation shift towards expanding our opportunity across every segment. Our next chapter is about scaling the client business, deepening our council advantage, and unlocking new growth with AI at the edge. If I can leave you one thought today, it’s we are ready to lead the gaming and AI PC era.”

This story was updated with additional detail at 2:44 PM PT.