AMD is teasing its upcoming Ryzen 9000 X3D processors, following up on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D. AMD hasn't announced exactly which processors will be getting the X3D treatment, but they will be arriving on store shelves on November 7, 2024.
The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is still one of the most powerful gaming processors on the market, more than a year after it launched in April 2023. While AMD launched a new generation of processors led by the Ryzen 9 9950X, they don't perform quite as well as the X3D chips from the last generation. This is because the Ryzen 7 7800X3D uses a unique 3D-stacked cache design that both boosts the amount of cache each chip has access to, but also reduces that cache's latency. A potent combination for gaming.
In the meantime, AMD has announced a holiday price drop for its processors starting October 20. Team Red's latest processors will be discounted by up to $50 for the Ryzen 9 9950X, a $649 CPU. The full discounts are as follows:
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X – $50 off
- AMD Ryzen 9 9900X – $30 off
- AMD Ryzen 7 9700X – $30 off
- AMD Ryzen 5 9600X – $30 off
Ryzen 9000, now in 3D!
AMD's latest processors have had a bit of a rough launch, to say the least. In an effort to curb over-enthusiastic power consumption, Team Red has dialed back its desktop processors this time around. While this led to much better temperatures across the board, performance has suffered, leading to some processors falling behind their last-generation counterparts.
At the high end, it's possible to catch glimpses of the the peak performance of the Zen 5, the architecture behind these new processors. In my Ryzen 9 9950X review, I was genuinely impressed with its performance, even if it fell short in gaming workloads. But that's where X3D comes in.
The Best PC Games
AMD's X3D processors use a technology called 3D V-Cache to shove more L3 cache into the processors. This cache is essentially super-fast memory that's built into the processor; your CPU will store information it needs to access all the time in this cache, because it can access it faster than your system memory, or RAM. Basically, the more data your CPU can store in cache, the less time it has to wait on slower RAM to process data. And this is especially evident in games.
That's why the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D has become the de-facto gaming processor, with even Intel admitting that its upcoming Core Ultra 200S processors can't keep up with it in games. So, while we don't know anything about these upcoming X3D chips other than that they're coming, they're probably going to be impressive for gaming.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra