AMD says Intel's 'horrible product' is causing Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages

At a small roundtable session with AMD executives at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, we asked the company for details about continuing shortages of its flagship gaming-optimized Ryzen 7 9800X3D — currently the uncontested best CPU for gaming — and when we can expect the supply to improve. AMD chalked it up to unprecedented demand and noted that Intel's "horrible" product, also known as Arrow Lake, has led to wildly increased demand that has pushed far beyond initial projections. In a separate roundtable, I also had the chance to ask Intel about its plans to fire back at AMD's dominating 3D V-Cache processors.

"We knew we built a great part. We didn't know the competitor [Intel] had built a horrible one," quipped AMD executive Frank Azor. "So the demand has been a little higher than we forecasted."

It's no secret that Intel's Arrow Lake delivered underwhelming gaming performance at launch. Although the company has promised a 'fix' for the issue, we recently tested the full and complete patch on multiple systems. We found the patch does nothing to help (at least on two motherboards) and that the newer Windows revision required for the fix has benefited competing processors more, thus making Intel's Arrow Lake competitive positioning even worse than at launch. We'll publish that testing soon.

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