The new most expensive RYZEN AM5 processor sold out very quickly. You can’t find it in stock practically anywhere, it’s only available to order everywhere, and we’ll have to wait for further deliveries. Behind-the-scenes sources say that AMD unfortunately significantly underestimated how good the RYZEN 9 7950X3D is in practice, and how much interest there will be, and simply did not produce enough of them. It is not the first time that AMD underestimated the interest in its TOP product, it already happened with the previous RYZEN 9 xx50 generations, it happened with the Radeon 7900 XTX, etc. Of course, it is probably a better and more pleasant worry than having to deal with these TOP products they are lying in warehouses and nobody wants them ;). However, the shortage is not a good situation either for the company and certainly not for the customers.
This is evidenced by the fact that the 12-core RYZEN 9 7900X3D is still available in stock. But the company didn’t even send it for reviews because it knows that, with the exception of some games, the performance will simply be worse everywhere than the 16-core standard RYZEN 9 7950X (without 3D), which is sold today for a similar or even lower price. So the 7900X3D is just not very attractive.
However, the same cannot be said about the 16-core RYZEN 9 7950X3D. Yes, it is more expensive, but it is not expensive considering the fact that it clearly has the best gaming performance and almost the best application performance, where it beats the Intel Core i9-13900K and is only a few insignificant % behind the RYZEN 9 7950X. However, both crush with efficiency, when the 7950X3D has only 120W TDP compared to 170W for the 7950X and 253W+ for the 13900K. And the differences in practice in consumption are really significant:
So significant that you save anything when buying a 7950X let alone a 13900K, so if you really use them a lot and make them difficult, in a few years the “discount” in the purchase price will significantly exceed the operating costs of electricity. The impressive efficiency is one of the interesting features of AMD’s L3 layering. Personally, I think AMD made a mistake in listing the RYZEN 9 7900X3D as well. In my opinion, it should have listed only the 7950X3D and 7800X3D, which make sense in terms of design and purpose. And so their higher, less favorable prices are easily excused and actually won’t bother customers at all. But the 7900X3D simply doesn’t make sense, and it’s a waste of silicon, where the expensive layered CCD chip has only 6 out of 8 cores active, which just doesn’t seem productive or operationally efficient to me and, as a result, not even interesting for customers due to the necessary extra payment with regard to production extra costs. In addition, by not introducing the 7900X3D, AMD could have devoted more production capacity and chips to both models, i.e. the 7950X3D and 7800X3D, which are and will be in high demand, as they are in many ways the best mainstream processors in their class.
Now it also makes sense to postpone the start of sales of the 8-core RYZEN 7 7800X3D, which will be released in a month in April. Taking into account the fact that it will probably have even better gaming performance on average than the 7950X3D, because it completely eliminates core load management problems, when it simply has only one CCD and it always has L3, so the interest in this processor will be huge. Just as it was and is about the RYZEN 7 5800X3D, which is still in the TOP 3 best-selling processors in retail today. It is therefore clear that in terms of the number of pieces, AMD will have to offer significantly more than the 7950X3D, hence the delay. It simply now accumulates the necessary quantity so as not to sell out immediately. Even so, it probably won’t be enough, because AMD didn’t even estimate the interest in the relatively expensive 7950X3D and simply doesn’t have enough of them. On the other hand, it has a little more time and space in production.
Otherwise, it is not very clear how much more expensive and more complicated the production of the ZEN 4 CCD with layered L3 is. AMD is quite guarded about information. Of course, the L3 cache extra chip itself costs something by itself. But it should be very simple and cheap to manufacture. But it will cost a few dollars. How much the extra manufacturing step in the form of additional layering (i.e. “sticking” the L3 cache on the ZEN 4 CCD), which is also performed by TSMC, is a secret. The question is what production volume AMD instructed TSMC to produce those ZEN 4 3D V-cache chips. Whether it will be enough to cover the demand not only for RYZEN X3D but soon also for EPYC with 3D V-cache. Many also wonder if it would be worth making the mobile versions of ZEN 4 in particular also layered, but at the moment AMD does not seem to have any such product planned for the current generation.
Otherwise, if you are thinking about buying RYZEN 9 7950X3D and RYZEN 7 7800X3D, I probably wouldn’t hesitate to order if you don’t want to wait a long time. It looks like physical availability of both will be somewhat limited due to understandable interest, which could take weeks or months after their official launch before any production ramp-up can be seen or most of the demand is met. In short, even AMD probably didn’t expect how good and therefore in demand these processors would be…
| AUTHOR: Jan “DD” Stach |
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| I prefer to do things slowly and properly rather than quickly and poorly. |
