AMD blames Intel's "horrible" CPUs for Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages

[midian182]

Big quote: What do you do when your latest CPU is proving so popular that consumers are struggling to get their hands on it? If you're AMD, it's to partly blame rival Intel for releasing such a "horrible product" as a competitor – I.e., the Arrow Lake desktop processors.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D has been a phenomenal success among what had been a fairly underwhelming Zen 5 lineup – we called it the new gaming CPU king in our review. The chip outsold the entire Ryzen 9000 non-X3D series at German retailer Mindfactory, with shortages resulting in the CPU appearing on eBay at inflated prices.

During a roundtable session with AMD executives at CES 2025, Tom's Hardware asked about the Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages and when the situation might improve.

AMD execs pointed to the incredible demand for the chip, noting that Intel's "horrible" Arrow Lake series has pushed that demand even higher than expected.

"We knew we built a great part. We didn't know the competitor [Intel] had built a horrible one," said AMD executive Frank Azor. "So, the demand has been a little higher than we forecasted."

Amazon.com's best-selling CPUs. The top 13 are all from AMD

Apart from the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the rest of the Zen 5 launch didn't exactly set the world on fire, but it was still better than Arrow Lake, which was slammed for its poor gaming performance, higher-than-expected latency, and compatibility issues.

In November, Intel said that certain combinations of BIOS and operating system settings created issues that impacted performance, promising that fixes were incoming.

Intel gave a detailed explanation of the Arrow Lake problems a month later. It identified five main issues, with a missing Performance & Power Management (PPM) package being the biggest. The company rolled out firmware updates to address the situation. Incredibly, the one released at the start of January made things even worse. Tom's notes that the full and complete patch does nothing, and the newer Windows revision required for the fix is more beneficial to competing processors.

AMD always expected the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to do well, but it could not have predicted the disaster of Arrow Lake making demand for its chip stratospheric. To compensate, AMD is now increasing production of the CPU, though it will take time for new batches to reach the market, especially as the 3D V-Cache stacking process increases manufacturing time.

AMD recently announced the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D. One might imagine that their release will make it easier to find a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but AMD executive David McAfee says demand for the 8-core CPU outweighs the higher-core-count products by 10 to 1 or more as it's "such a great gaming part for a pure gamer."

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AMD blames Intel's "horrible" CPUs for Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages

 

[ScottSoapbox]

This is hilarious but true.

With 3 month lead times you have to forcast demand and no one would have forcast Intel’s chips getting worse in several metrics. Even Intel was surprised at their own gaming performance (really makes one wonder what the internal testing is).

 

[yRaz]

While true, the 9800X3D is over kill and most people will be GPU limited long before being CPU limited.

From a hobby perspective, the 9800X3D is awesome. From a real world value perspective, it doesn't really offer that much.

 

[godrilla]

AMD can't handle the pressure of being number one. It's Intel's fault. Hopefully they do not drop the ball with Zen 6. Also it seems that the 5090 will not be cpu bound from the performance slides that were presented at 4k.

 

[Achaios]

I admit I never saw that coming. I never believed the clowns over at AMD would amount to anything much. It was ez to predict NVIDIA's rise and buy NVIDIA stock back in 2022 but I never saw AMD coming.

I remember that ridiculous vid Linus did, starring that uh Indian guy called Krishnalundu something. At the time he was leading the AMD GPU dept. He tried to handle a GPU but he was so full of fail that the GPU slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. He later found his way to Intel as a DEI hire.

I never looked into Su as I should have, like a good investor. She's the cousin of the Leatherman. If I knew that back when she took over, I might have invested some money on AMD stock.

Oh well.

 

[nnguy2]

AMD can't handle the pressure of being number one. It's Intel's fault. Hopefully they do not drop the ball with Zen 6. Also it seems that the 5090 will not be cpu bound from the performance slides that were presented at 4k.

That's because they're rendering at 1080p.

 

[nnguy2]

He later found his way to Intel as a DEI hire.

I never looked into Su as I should have, like a good investor. She's the cousin of the Leatherman. If I knew that back when she took over, I might have invested some money on AMD stock.

Oh well.

Su and Jensen are both DEI hire according to you.

 

[Achaios]

Su and Jensen are both DEI hire according to you.

No, they are not.

 

[airbornex]

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is like a gaming console at launch: everyone wants it, nobody can find it, and the scalpers are having a field day. Meanwhile, Intel is out here releasing CPUs that are basically “beta testing” in disguise.

 

[HardwareHunt365]

Lovely. But when it is Intel that says such a thing, all hell breaks loose. AMD does it = hilarious.

 

[unoficialoficial]

But in the past, they were doing the exact opposite. They were realising CPUs with zero or minimal L2 cache (Duron and Celeron). They never chased a solution for extra cache, which was clearly a mistake, because as we can see today only the sales of the CPU with the extra cache with the advanced implementation with connectivity on the back, scales well. So Duron and Celeron was horrible idea.

 

[vvtunes]

My 5800x3d is still kicking, I totally understand the exceptional demand for x3d parts (for gaming). In the past, intel cpus somewhat suffered from cache restrictions, that is why a 6-core ryzen 5600x performs at (aprox.) the same level as an equivalent 8-core 10700k. I remember Techspot doing an article comparing the 10900k to the 10700k by disabling cores and restricting frequencies. The i9 model showed increased performance believed to be due to the higher L3 cache capacity.
Be aware that a firmware update for Intel's ultra series is still pending, but probably the latency problems can only be solved by revising the architecture. Perhaps some highly cached x3d competitor could turn the tide.

 

[xAlias]

I admit I never saw that coming. I never believed the clowns over at AMD would amount to anything much. It was ez to predict NVIDIA's rise and buy NVIDIA stock back in 2022 but I never saw AMD coming.

I remember that ridiculous vid Linus did, starring that uh Indian guy called Krishnalundu something. At the time he was leading the AMD GPU dept. He tried to handle a GPU but he was so full of fail that the GPU slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. He later found his way to Intel as a DEI hire.

I never looked into Su as I should have, like a good investor. She's the cousin of the Leatherman. If I knew that back when she took over, I might have invested some money on AMD stock.

Oh well.

If you are talking about Raja Koduri, he got hired by Intel to lead their GPU department when they started to expand it to go discrete.

Are you saying he is a DEI hire because Intel GPUs are not doing good?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

OMG people let AMD have a little fun.

Anyone who remembers the dark days of bulldozer knows AMD has earned a little ****-slinging cred at this point.

 

[axiomatic13]

Using "DEI hire" as a pejorative should be against the Techspot TOS but they're really letting things go to pot lately?

 

[aimer]

It's intel fault, yes! Hahaha

 

[GoldenGoat]

I wouldn't say horrible, but it does seems like Intel has all their best engineers working on graphics cards and their interns working on CPU's.

 

[trparky]

OK AMD, cool. You better take all the revenue you can from the sales of these chips and plow it into R&D. Don't sit down, don't take a rest, you have to keep punching that bag no matter what the competition does.

That's what Intel did and now look at them.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

While true, the 9800X3D is over kill and most people will be GPU limited long before being CPU limited.

From a hobby perspective, the 9800X3D is awesome. From a real world value perspective, it doesn't really offer that much.

It helps with some non-gaming applications. I have statistical software that doesn't scale well past about 4 cores for most analyses and is memory sensitive, so 8 fast cached cores is actually better than 12 or 16 slightly slower cores.

That's my one issue with most of the "productivity" benchmarks in reviews is that they are all programs that either use 16+ cores or 1 and there is software in the middle of the extremes.

 

[bviktor]

While true, the 9800X3D is over kill and most people will be GPU limited long before being CPU limited.

From a hobby perspective, the 9800X3D is awesome. From a real world value perspective, it doesn't really offer that much.

From a real world value perspective, it’s an excellent way to future proof your CPU.

 

[user556]

Lovely. But when it is Intel that says such a thing, all hell breaks loose. AMD does it = hilarious.

When has Intel credited AMD for Intel's success?

 

[scoffer]

Just seems to highlight the incompetence of AMD management. Even if they had over-produced initially, stocks would still have evened out eventually.

 

[scoffer]

Using "DEI hire" as a pejorative should be against the Techspot TOS but they're really letting things go to pot lately?

Why should they ban any such language? "DEI hiring" is a proven fact.

 

[toooooot]

Why should they ban any such language? "DEI hiring" is a proven fact.

Might as well ban saying truth.

 

[magisys]

Even the 7800x3d is hard to find and has inflated prices. it seems that the only x3d cpu avalaible with right price is the 7900x3d