In a recent roundtable session between Tom’s Hardware and AMD at this year’s CES, the brand revealed some of the issues surrounding chip manufacturing and stock availability.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D was a smash hit when it launched back in November 2024, selling out almost instantly thanks to its well-priced MSRP and solid gaming performance. Since then, the newly crowned best CPU for gaming has seemingly been in and out of stock due to its popularity in the DIY PC Builder space. However, new comments made by AMD have revealed the potential reasons why the chip is struggling to maintain stock at various retailers.
Speaking with Tom’s Hardware at this year’s CES Tradeshow, AMD stated “Building a traditional semiconductor, it’s basically 12 to 13 weeks from when you start a wafer to when you get a product out the other end of the machine…. The [3D V-Cache] stacking process adds time to that, and so it’s longer than a quarter horizon [three months] to really ramp output of those products.”. This is some of the best insight we’ve seen when it comes to understanding why the stock availability of the 9800X3D has been so sporadic. It also highlights the fact that, unless AMD resolves this, the 9800X3D could be hard to find for some time to come.
Best CPU for gaming
Specifications
- Cores: 8
- Threads: 16
- Boost clock speed: 5.2GHz
- Base clock speed: 4.7GHz
- L3 cache: 96MB
- TDP: 120W
- Platform: AM5
AMD working towards a solution for the 9800X3D manufacturing process
With demand seemingly relentless for the 9800X3D, it’s no surprise that AMD is “working very hard” to try and catch up. David McAfee, VP & GM of Ryzen CPU and Radeon Graphics at AMD, goes on to say “We have been ramping our manufacturing capacity, or the monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts, period, and that’s 7000 [series] as well as 9000X3D,”.
It’s clear that AMD was not expecting such high demand for the 9800X3D, claiming it was “unprecedented” and “higher than ever.”. They even go on to say that one of the biggest reasons for demand was down to poor competition on Intel’s part – which was likely a major factor in the pre-launch manufacturing forecast.
The good news for fans is, that the CPU is coming back into stock more frequently as we move into Q1 of 2025 – with AMD claiming “I think as we go through the first half of this year, you’ll see us continue to increase the output of X3D.”.
The popularity of the gaming-optimized CPU is also doing the rounds on X this week, with Techepiphany highlighting the impressive sales numbers of the 9800X3D over at popular German retailer, Mindfactory. At the time of writing, the part has eclipsed 16,000 units sold – equating to around €9.5 million worth of revenue.
