TECH NEWS – A press release slipped out ahead of schedule, effectively confirming that AMD is planning yet another high-end processor.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 did not appear at this year’s CES, which only added to the suspicion that it might never arrive at all. Still, at least one motherboard manufacturer briefly behaved as if the dual 3D V-Cache chip had already been formally unveiled. In a press release that has since been deleted, ASRock stated that its AM5 motherboards would support the newly introduced AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, a processor the company described as delivering unmatched performance to gamers worldwide. The problem is simple enough: the press release was dated March 16, and this CPU has not actually launched.
Beyond a short reference to the chip’s dual-CCD 3D V-Cache design, which supposedly offers more cache than ever and pushes gaming performance even further on top of an already extremely powerful processor, no real specifications were mentioned. To this day, very little has been officially confirmed about the chip. ASRock’s statement was clearly never meant to go public, since it was quickly pulled. That makes it tempting to wonder whether the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 might never fully materialize at all. Still, because the processor appeared in AMD’s official documentation earlier this year, and because various partners have effectively confirmed that it is eventually coming, that outcome does not seem especially likely. A far more plausible explanation is that ASRock simply published its press release on the wrong date.
According to that release, AM5 motherboards would support the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 after downloading and installing BIOS version 4.03, but that does not sound entirely convincing. If taken at face value, it would also imply support on A620 motherboards, which feels hard to square with a chip rumored to carry a 200 W TDP. It seems more likely that the full reveal of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 will happen later this year, alongside support through a newer BIOS revision.
Whether the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 will actually be worth buying, assuming it launches, is a separate issue. There may well be scenarios where the extra cache provided by 3D V-Cache across both CCDs makes a meaningful difference – particularly in workloads that stretch beyond eight cores. In gaming, though, the upside will probably be far more limited, something AMD itself hinted at a year ago. Then again, AMD may have changed course. It originally seemed ready to introduce the chip, then backed away.
AMD is still expected to launch its Zen 6 chips later this year, with new X3D processors likely following not long after.
Source: PC Gamer, VideoCardz
