In May 2015, we reported that AMD's first Zen CPUs, launching in Q4 2016, would most likely be quad-core chips based on a presentation slide showing the company's Zen core units scaling up to four cores with shared L3 cache. According to new information released one year later, this may not be the case and, the company could be preparing to launch eight and six-core variants in a tight efficiency race against Intel's 'Kaby Lake' CPUs.

AMD's official ?Zen-based Quad Core Unit? slide? was released May 6, 2015 during its Financial Analyst Day when the company claimed its new platform will have a more competitively-focused IPC design, higher core counts, lower latency caches and will be based on second-generation 14nm Low-Power Plus (LPP) process technology.