@OLD_NEWBIE
"Huh? This is not "odd" at all (for AMD or any company). Why, then, is anything up for pre-order? How about: gauging interest, adjusting initial production runs, appeasing/capitalizing on early adopters, guaranteeing sales for your distribution partners...I could go on and on. Offering pre-orders is the marketing world we live in now."
Sure, but pre-orders without a shred of independent testing, especially for a product that is likely very, very different from previous offerings....? This isn't like Intel offering the i7-7700K for preorder here; we pretty much new what that was going to be like. So while you might come up with some off the cuff reasons pre-orders are nice in an abstract sense, doing so still requires a pretty big leap of faith by the customers in this case and I'm sure the "I'll just return it if I'm disappointed" mentality is alive and well in those making preorders. I'd also guess having a substantial fraction of the preorders returned, should independent bench marks turn out to be disappointing, isn't the greatest thing to make your distribution partners happy..... But then again, if you're plunking down ~$500 for a processor and mobo without any real performance metrics, you're likely an AMD fan boy that's going to buy one and live with it no matter what anyway, so what do I know?