- AMD’s Frank Azor has fired shots at Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs
- He called the Core Ultra 200S CPUs ‘horrible’ and said this increased demand for the Ryzen 9800X3D
- That higher demand has led to stock woes, Azor claims, and inventory issues won’t likely ease anytime soon
An AMD executive fired flak at Intel, calling Team Blue’s latest Arrow Lake desktop chips ‘horrible’ no less.
The quote came from a roundtable with AMD execs at CES 2025, where our sibling site, Tom’s Hardware, asked about the ongoing shortage of Ryzen 7 9800X3D stock (regarded as the best CPU for gaming that you can buy since its launch, and a processor that we gave a glowing review).
AMD observed that demand has outstripped supply – clearly enough – and the full quote from Frank Azor, who heads up consumer and gaming marketing at AMD, will surely leave Intel bigwigs suitably unimpressed.
Azor told Tom’s Hardware: “We knew we built a great part [in the 9800X3D]. We didn’t know the competitor [Intel] had built a horrible one [Arrow Lake]. So the demand has been a little higher than we forecasted.”
Ouch. You’ve probably noticed that Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop chips, which arrived in October 2024, experienced a rocky launch, with various problems that Team Blue still hasn’t fully put to bed.
We’ll come back to Intel’s misfortunes later, but what about the Ryzen 9800X3D stock situation?
David McAfee, VP and GM of Ryzen channel business at AMD, explained: “It’s crazy how much we have increased [our monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts] over what we were planning. I would say the demand we’ve seen for the 9800X3D and the 7800X3D has been unprecedented. So the demand has been higher than ever.”
McAfee notes that making chips takes some time – “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” – and that the 3D V-Cache stacking process adds complexity and is even more time consuming. Meaning it’s harder to catch up with unexpected spikes in demand.
The upshot? McAfee says: “I think as we go through the first half of this year, you’ll see us continue to increase the output of X3D.” And the exec further notes that in the future, AMD is “ramping capacity to ensure we catch up with that demand for as long as customers want those X3D parts.”
It’s the Ryzen 7 X3D processors which represent most of the demand, you’ll be unsurprised to learn – as the benefits of hopping up to a Ryzen 9 X3D chip are marginal for PC gamers (if anything, indeed, gaming performance may even dip). So the 9800X3D and its predecessor represent the sweet spot for gaming and value.
McAfee said the workhorse 8-core X3D parts outsell Ryzen 9 X3D flavors by a massive 10-to-1, all of which means that the introduction of Ryzen 9950X3D and 9900X3D CPUs (ushered in at CES 2025) isn’t going to ease any pressure on the stock levels of the 9800X3D.
Analysis: Broken Arrow? Hardly…
In short, don’t expect the Ryzen 9800X3D to become more widely available for some time yet, though as we head into the second quarter of 2025, matters should ease and the CPU may well populate the shelves in greater numbers.
Back to the flak fired by AMD at Intel, and it’s pretty harsh to use a term like ‘horrible’ to describe a rival product. Is desktop Arrow Lake really that awful? Well, the launch wasn’t a disaster, but it was disappointing, particularly as gaming performance did not live up to Intel’s promises due to multiple issues.
That said, Intel’s fixes – which have now been deployed for Arrow Lake, all but one final measure – don’t help much, or at all, at least according to Tom’s Hardware’s (limited) testing. Something we’ll need to verify ourselves, mind you, so take that with plenty of caution at this stage.
At any rate, Arrow Lake desktop has been troubled since it was pushed out, there’s no denying that, and the problem is that this happened against a backdrop of more serious instability issues with Intel’s preceding Core CPU ranges (13th and 14th) on the desktop. Those were really nasty gremlins in the works, and while Intel had them fixed by the end of last year, that whole episode was a very dark cloud over 2024 for Team Blue – with considerable reputational damage done.
So, while that episode has nothing to do with Arrow Lake – which doesn’t suffer those instability woes – it still casts a deep shadow over Intel’s newest desktop range and the separate issues with these chips.
It’s a messy time for Intel in the CPU world, in short, and AMD pulling no punches isn’t really a surprise. Although as we’ve said, ‘horrible’ is going rather too far, and somewhat gleefully playing on Intel’s other mishaps of late.
It should be noted that AMD is not entirely without blemishes with its current-gen processors, as Ryzen 9000 launched to some disappointment with its generational uplift, again particularly for gaming – though the 9800X3D has gone a long way towards addressing that. The only problem is you can’t buy the thing at the moment, a situation which isn’t about to change, clearly.
