The first whiffs of Zen 2 are finally reaching us. During the AMD press conference at Computex today CEO Dr. Lisa Su stood on stage and held up the first public showing of Rome, the codename for AMD’s next-generation EPYC enterprise processor family.

Rome is exciting because it will be the first 7nm high-performance processor in the market, and it makes the 10nm production problems that Intel is having all the more troublesome for the blue-chip giant. And because Rome will be socket compatible with the currently shipping EPYC systems, there is a huge potential for market penetration through 2019.

AMD stated that it would be sampling Rome-based Zen 2 processors to partners in the second half of 2018, with launch in 2019. AMD does have silicon back in the labs, up and running. No more timing detail was given than that.

The competitive statement of AMD putting timeframes on its 7nm server processors, rumored to be going up to 64-cores PER SOCKET, while Intel struggles with its move to 10nm, is significant. AMD still targets a 5% market share for server processors by the end of the year, but it might be 2019 that proves to be a more significant year for the company’s drive back into the server space.