News, or perhaps we should say rumors, have been fluttering across the interweb that implies that AMD may well be considering a similar strategy of selling special unlocked and OC optimized models of its forthcoming Summit Ridge platform. The company obviously hopes that Summit Ridge and especially the significant performance improvements of the Zen processor architecture, will catapult them back into the high-performance segment that Intel has completely dominated in the last decade or so. But if AMD’s new product line-up is competitive to Intel, do we really want or expect AMD to follow Intel and the ‘K’ SKU model strategy, basically asking a few dollars more for an unlocked version of the same chip? According to Techfrag, the story was broken by the Italian geeks at BitsandChips.

“Intel has their K-series SKUs when it comes to CPUs. These have unlocked multipliers, meaning that if you have the correct type of motherboard then you can overclock these a fair bit. AMD seems to be going down the same road with their AMD Zen Summit Ridge series processors. Word has it that there will be AMD Zen Summit Ridge CPUs that will be aimed at overclockers as these overclockable variants will be able to go up a fair amount as compared to their non-overclockable variants.”

“Rumors suggest that there will be at least one AMD Zen Summit Ridge overclockable variant and that these will come with a higher clock speed out of the box and will have a higher overclocking margin as well. It has been suggested that this AMD Zen Summit Ridge CPU will have 8 cores and a TDP of 95W.”

I would certainly be disappointed if AMD decided to lock the mutipliers of standard model APUS and CPUs, charging extra for an unlocked variant of the same part. The again if we are simply looking at something similar to the Black Edition chips, where AMD sell a higher binned version specifically for overclocking without a bundled heatsink, then perhaps fair enough.

Chime in with your own thoughts in the forum link below.

Source. Source.