AMD has made it known publicly that its Zen CPU architecture for the Ryzen processor has the capacity to last for at least four years. This vital feature has been confirmed by Mark Papermaster, Chief Technology Officer at AMD, and added that they will not follow Intel's Tick-Tock model but will use the Tock cycle.

AMD developed the Zen architecture for four years and it will take another four for it to complete its recommended life span. The company intends to introduce future revisions to the processor to increase its efficiency and performance.

Sources reveal that a Tock cycle introduces a new type of architecture, while the Tick cycle represents a process shrink that also includes architecture adjustments. Intel reportedly favored the Process-Architecture-Optimization (PAO) Cadence with its own brand of processors. AMD, however, will stick with the Tock-Tock-Tock cycle that simply means the next two generations of Zen will feature a more improved architecture rather than a process shrink. Additionally, this also means AMD will maintain its 14-nm semiconductor device fabrication node and migrate to the 7 nm after the year 2020.

As a point of clarification, reports point out that Papermaster may have meant that AMD will release new CPUs every year rather than release a batch of Ryzen processors and wait for another four years until new ones are made available in the market. The improvements that will be made on the Ryzen annually are expected to be big and will most especially address power efficiency.

The bigger question now is when will the products be made available. Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Computing and Graphics business, told PC World that Ryzen chips will be available to interested buyers on the day they will launch and would not have to wait for several more weeks before they can get their hands on the merchandise. "We're not going to do a paper launch. We've done that before. We're not going to mess with it."

The Ryzen chips are expected to be released in March.