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

Burn!

by · TechSpot

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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."

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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.

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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."