The new Ryzen 9: Did AMD just announce a CPU for exactly no one?

AMD’s X3D series of Ryzen CPUs are an absolute smash hit for PC gamers, so it’s no surprise that the company is rolling out even more of them. After months of rumors, the company officially announced the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, the new top-of-the-line processor with performance-boosting V-cache on both chiplets. It’ll be here on April 22nd, for anyone who wants it. Don’t everybody get up at once.

My flippant tone aside, this really is a big deal for PC gamers who operate at the highest levels of performance…and budget. The 9950X3D2 is similar in structure to the flagship Zen 5 CPU, the 16-core, 32-string 9950X3D, except that it doubles up the V-cache. The chip has 208 megabytes of total cache, presumably 192 of it V-cache, now on both sides of the chip and accessible to all cores. It also gets up to 200 watts of TDP, a boost over the 170 watts of the previous top dog.

It’s a big, beastly behemoth of a CPU with no immediately discernible weak spots — aside from what it’ll wind up costing. The PC industry is in crisis, plagued by shortages and skyrocketing prices for RAM, storage, GPUs, and other components being gobbled up by AI titans. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 will no doubt be a monster when it hits the streets, but it’s only a hair faster than the vanilla 9950X3D in a handful of niche production tasks — AMD isn’t even advertising this chip for gamers, the X3D line’s traditional stronghold. It’s hard to envision exactly who this chip is for, especially since its price tag could soar perilously close to $1,000.

Ironically, AMD built the ultimate Ryzen CPU at the worst possible time.

Is the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 worth it?

Gamers have been wondering if AMD would eventually do this ever since the X3D series started way back in 2022, two generations ago. Pundits (including some of our own on The Full Nerd) thought there wouldn’t be much point to it, since the V-cache hardware is already extremely expensive just sitting on one half of the die, and expanding it to all the cores isn’t hugely beneficial in terms of gaming, where going past six cores or so usually has diminishing returns.

That seems to track with AMD’s announcement. According to the promotional information, the 9950X3D2 (woo that’s a mouthful) “delivers 5-10% performance gains over the current Ryzen 9 9950X3D across creative workloads like DaVinci Resolve, Blender, and large-scale source code builds like Unreal Engine and Chromium.” You might notice a distinct lack of actual games in that list, and indeed, the header of the PR email sitting in my inbox says the new super chip is “for developers and creators.”

The promo video is a little more even-handed, but delivering a similar message. AMD’s general manager of the Computing and Graphics Group Jack Huynh said, “You still get the incredible gaming performance you expect from a Ryzen 9 X3D processor. But where the 9950X3D2 really shines Is in workloads that thrive on ultra-fast data access. Large software builds, game engine compiles, AI models, 3D rendering, and complex content creation pipelines.” Yeah, you knew that AI stuff was coming.

We don’t have complete information yet — we don’t even have a price, which will presumably be a considerable boost over the standard $700 Ryzen 9 9950X3D. But between the more production-focused tone of the announcement, and the absolute “AI” nightmare of the current situation for anyone who wants to build a PC with lots of fast RAM and storage, it seems like this isn’t going to be a massive deal for PC gamers. Even though it’s very cool.

Sure, a few of you with unlimited budgets might buy one to drop into your massive Zen 5 desktop the moment it’s available, chasing that “5-10%” performance boost — and again, it probably won’t be ten percent more frames in, say, Arc Raiders. The rest of us will probably be fine sitting on a less bombastic (but still fantastic) 9800X3D, 7800X3D, or even an older 5800X3D.

All that gloom and doom being said, I’m still a PC enthusiast. Of course I’m going to read the benchmarks when they come out, just to see if bigger bar better. And who knows, developers and software geniuses could find a way to make that extra V-cache sing.

Update, April 8th: AMD has announced that the 9950X3D2 Dual Edition will be available on April 22nd at a suggested retail price of $899. Yeah, that’s about right…or at least, about what I expected.