AMD has finally taken the wraps off of its highly anticipated Zen CPU architecture which is now officially called Ryzen. As promised, AMD unveiled the CPU during the New Horizons event on Dec. 13 and promised that the first batch of products with the CPU will hit the market within the first quarter of 2017. AMD also presented a handful of benchmark results pitting its new Ryzen processor against its Intel counterpart.

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AMD said that the first Ryzen processors will be released as part of the Summit Ridge family of high-end desktop processors. The first of the Ryzen chips will have eight cores, and 16 threads. Ryzen is a true eight-core processor which uses simultaneous multithreading, as opposed to the clustered multithreading used by AMD on its Bulldozer processors, according to Ars Technica. The Ryzen chips also sport 20MB of L2 and L3 cache.

The high-end model of the Ryzen Summit Ridge processor family has a base clock of 3.4GHz. AMD is yet to confirm the chip's turbo boost speed. Compared to AMD's older CPU lineups which are notoriously known for their excessive heat, the new AMD Ryzen processors only have a 95W TDP. This is a major boost for AMD, especially when Intel's Core i7 6900K has a 140W TDP.

AMD's Ryzen processors will require the new AM4 platform. According to AnandTech, it will support DD4, PCIe gen 3, NVMe, SATA Express storage options, and USB 3.1 gen 2. There are rumors that the new AM4 platform will require at least a Windows 10 operating system to run, although AMD has yet to confirm this.

The biggest mystery after AMD's big revelation is the price of the Ryzen processor. AMD revealed that the Ryzen processor outperforms the Intel Core i7 6900K in a handful of benchmarks. As of this writing, an Intel Core i7 6900K costs more than $1,000.