content: It should be a great platform. AMD is getting rid of FM and AM platforms being split, now everything will be on AM4. So you can buy an AMD motherboard and put in anything from the new Excavator desktop APUs that are coming out to the 8 core Zen CPUs. No longer split like Intel with Mainstream and Enthusiast socket or AMD's current AM/FM split. It's going to make upgrading CPUs a lot easier. It's going to be a lot like the old days when you could get nice upgrades for CPU without having to upgrade your motherboard. Something that has been completely lost with Intel's shenanigans ever since AMD's Bulldozer family.  The design fixes a lot of problems with Bulldozer family (current FX CPUs and APUs). The module approach is gone too. Obviously this needs some salt after the whole JF-AMD thing, but AMD targeted Intel level single thread performance and one of the engineers said they hit that target.  Really, the only thing I can see going wrong for Zen is the process being poor and not allowing massive overclocks, or even high clock speed. The 32nm AMD is using for their current CPUs (not so much APUs, they use 28nm) is an over clocker's dream and it can take an absolute beating. I know, I have an FX 8350 I run over 5ghz and about 1.6v (it's liquid cooled with a custom loop). I don't think we'll see that translate over to 14nm or 16nm finFET.  The design itself should be good. Jim Keller had a lot to do with the Zen design, and he was a central figure in making those semi-recent Apple ARM CPUs great as well as things like the AMD K8 architecture. Which, if you remember, was the last time AMD was actually competitive with Intel in the $200+ price bracket.  I'm cautiously optimistic. There's a good chance things will work out, the design seems very good. Only thing I can see going wrong is the process being bad, which can mean poor yields and high cost, or the process does not like high clock speed which means lower clocks for Zen, which is a possibility, it's not guaranteed. I imagine it'll end up topping out at mid 4ghz range over clocked, much like Intel now, and we will see some peak clock speed regression when overclocking. But Intel experienced the same with their 32nm Sandy Bridge chips breaking 5ghz under water easily yet latest 14nm Haswells struggle to make it past the mid 4.5ghz range. The fact that people can buy into the AMD platform with a cheap quad core CPU or even a lower end APU and still have the option to splurge on something as high as an 8 core CPU without having to swap motherboards and platforms is going to be something really great for consumers. It means when it's time to upgrade from a quad core or APU, you can take your budget of CPU and motherboard and just spend it solely on a CPU. That alone should make hex and octo core CPUs much more mainstream, which will go along extremely well with DX12 and Vulkan, provided Nvidia fixes their broken async shader architecture and stops holding those new APIs back and doing things like pushing Gameworks over new APIs.