AMD on HX3D chip shortages: ‘Competitor had built such a horrible [part]’

AMD’s world-beating 9800X3D chips destroyed the competition and promptly sold out. Why?

David McAfee, AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager of its Client Channel Business, and Frank Azor, the chief architect of gaming solutions and gaming marketing at AMD, sat down with reporters to give their answer: Intel’s competing Arrow Lake chip simply stunk.

In PCWorld’s review of the 9800X3D, we said that the chip obliterated Intel’s best. At the same time, supplies of the part — a single chip, mind you — promptly sold out. And now AMD has added the 9950X3D, an even more powerful chip, to the lineup.

For more details, including why AMD’s new GPUs weren’t included in the company’s CES 2025 keynote, the future of AI-rendered pixels, and how the new AMD AI Max chip shapes up to traditional gaming notebooks, see our Q&A with AMD’s executives.

Put simply, AMD simply didn’t anticipate the disparity between its own product and Intel’s. “Put it this way,” AMD’s Azor said. “We knew we built a great part. We didn’t know the competitor had built such a horrible one. So the demand has been a little bit higher than we had originally forecasted.”

McAfee went even further: “What I can say is that we have been ramping our manufacturing capacity — the monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts. That’s 7000X3D as well as 9000X3D. It’s crazy how much we have increased over what we were planning. I will say that the demand that we have seen from 9800X3D and 7800X3D has been unprecedented.”

Chips take about twelve weeks to go from the start of the wafer manufacturing process to end product, so even increasing the number of wafers (and eventually chips) takes time.

“And so it’s longer than a quarter to really ramp, you know, the output of those products, and so we’re working very, very hard to catch up with demand,” McAfee said. “I think as we go through the first half of this year, you’ll see us continue to increase output of X3D. You know there’s no secret, X3D has become a far more important part of our CPU portfolio than I think we, any of us, would have predicted a year ago. And I think that trend will continue into the future, and we are ramping capacity to ensure we catch up with that demand as long as consumers want those X3D parts.” Although the HX3D uses AMD’s stacked cache, the cache isn’t itself a gating factor, according to McAfee.

Meanwhile, AMD launched its “Fire Range” processors, which take the HX3D architecture and bring it to gaming notebooks. The Ryzen 9955HX3D has yet to ship, however. AMD also launched two new faster HX3D parts for the desktop.

McAfee said that the 7800X3D, the “affordable” option, was the one that consumers turned to — not the high-end, niche parts. “If I look historically at our 7000X3D products, the 7800X3D was dramatically the highest volume part in that product stack. I think that those 12- and 16-core parts, there are certain types of customers that buy those.”

He also added, “My belief is, in the 9000 series, those higher core count products, there’ll be some demand there, but it’ll still be ten-to-one or more on the eight-core X3D parts because they’re just such a great gaming part. For a pure gamer, there’s nothing else like it.”