AMD's monstrous Ryzen 9 9950X3D is ready to stomp all over Intel

The price of AMD's Ryzen X3D processors, though, are a mystery.

- MARK HACHMAN

At CES 2025, AMD revealed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D for desktop PCs, which the company is calling both the "world's best gaming processor" and the "world's best processor for content creation."

On paper, the comparison is brutal: AMD says its new chip is 20 percent faster in gaming than Intel's Arrow Lake flagship, the Core Ultra 285K (fave.co/4hACpC7).

AMD will ship the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and a second Ryzen 9 chip with v-cache, the Ryzen 9900X3D, to PC makers and customers beginning in the first quarter of 2025. Both of AMD's new desktop chips outperform the existing Ryzen 9800X3D in terms of clock speed and core count-and give buyers additional choices to fill out their gaming systems. Remember, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D obliterated the competition in its review (fave.co/30M9NIY), then immediately sold out (fave.co/4gOLFNT).

AMD also said that will bring the X3D architecture to laptops with its Fire Range lineup of mobile processors.