AMD has been teasing the arrival of its new flagship gaming CPU for some time, but has now reportedly revealed the precise date when you’ll be able to buy the new 16-core monster. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D release date is rumored to be March 12.
The news of the arrival of AMD‘s new best gaming CPU contender comes direct from the JD.com online store operated by AMD China. However, the listings have now disappeared and AMD hasn’t otherwise made a statement about the release, so we’re treating this news as a rumor for now.
The rumored release date was spotted by regular tech leak source, @harukaze5719 on X (formerly Twitter). In a post they show a screenshot of a page showing launch details of the CPU, accompanied with the words “R9 9950X3D, R9 9900X3D Available on March 12.”
Meanwhile, another tech leaker, @9550pro, posted pricing for the chips, also sourced from JD.com. It shows the price of the 9950X3D and its 12-core sibling, the 9900X3D, being set at 5599RMB and 5299RMB, which converts to roughly $772 and $730 respectively. If those prices are accurate, that would make them exceptionally expensive CPUs. That said, the non-X3D Ryzen 9 9950X does cost $549, so we would expect the X3D version to cost at least $600.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D was officially announced back in January as a new 16-core equivalent to what has proved to be the current fastest gaming CPU on the planet, as you can see in our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review.
That chip only has eight cores, so the new chip doubles this count to make for a far more powerful processor, when it comes to multi-core workloads. Moreover, AMD proclaimed the 9950X3D to be “the world’s best gaming processor.” To that end, the 9950X3D also comes with a faster clock speed than the 9800X3D, hitting a peak boost clock speed of 5.7GHz, compared to just 5.2GHz for the 9800X3D.
However, there’s a catch to the 9950X3D, which is that, while it has the same extra chip of L3 cache as other X3D chips, this cache only sits under eight of its cores. This means the other eight don’t get as quick access to this large extra cache. Meanwhile, it’s only the cores that don’t have 3D V-cache that get the big clock speed boost.
What’s the effect of this limitation? It means that if an instruction running on one of the non-X3D cores requires some data from the super-sized shared L3 cache, it may have to wait a little longer to get it. In turn, this could lead to slower performance in some scenarios. This same problem affected the 7950X3D and it resulted in that chip having slower gaming performance than the 7800X3D despite having double the number of cores – unfortunately for us, gaming is one task that particularly benefits from the extra cache.
However, the extra clock speed of the 9950X3D’s other eight cores will really help it in heavily multi-threaded software applications, such as video encoding and 3D rendering. AMD also recently told us that it has a new X3D driver update in the works, which it claims will reduce the latency issues seen on the 7950X3D that result from only one chip having the extra 3D V-cache. However, we’ll have to see for ourselves when we benchmark the new CPU.
Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a CPU that has the extra overall processing power of 16 cores but still has what should be some of the fastest gaming performance available, it’s likely to be the best choice when it arrives.
Whatever the case, for most gamers the 9800X3D will remain the best choice for peak gaming performance, and it will be the best value option too. If you’re looking for a new motherboard to go with this great choice of CPU, check out our best gaming motherboard guide.
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