- AMD’s Frank Azor took a shot at Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop processors
- He called the Core Ultra 200S processors “horrible” and said it increased demand for the Ryzen 9800X3D.
- This higher demand has led to inventory problems, Azor says, and the inventory problems are unlikely to ease anytime soon.
An AMD executive has slammed Intel, calling Team Blue’s latest Arrow Lake desktop chips “horrible.”
The quote comes from a roundtable with AMD executives at CES 2025, where our sister site, Tom’s Hardware, asked about the ongoing shortage of stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D (considered the best processor for gaming you can buy since its launch, and a processor that we have given a rave review).
AMD has observed that demand has outstripped supply – clearly – and the full quote from Frank Azor, head of consumer and gaming marketing at AMD, will surely leave Intel’s bigwigs unimpressed.
Azor told Tom’s Hardware: “We knew we had built a great piece [in the 9800X3D]. We didn’t know the competitor [Intel] I built a horrible one [Arrow Lake]. Demand was therefore a little higher than expected.
Ouch. You’ve probably noticed that Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop chips, arriving in October 2024, had a rocky launch, with various issues that Team Blue still hasn’t fully resolved.
We’ll come back to Intel’s woes later, but what about the Ryzen 9800X3D stock situation?
David McAfee, vice president and general manager of AMD’s Ryzen Channels business, explained: “It’s crazy how much we’ve grown [our monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts] about what we had planned. I would say the demand we’ve seen for the 9800X3D and 7800X3D is unprecedented. Demand is therefore higher than ever.
McAfee notes that chip manufacturing takes some time – “it basically takes 12 to 13 weeks from when you start a wafer to when you put out a product on the other end of the machine” – and that the process of 3D V-Cache stacking adds complexity and is even more time consuming. This means it is more difficult to catch up with unexpected increases in demand.
The result? McAfee says: “I think in the first half of this year you will see us continue to increase production of X3D. ” And the executive further notes that in the future, AMD will “increase capacity to ensure that we can meet this demand for as long as customers want these X3D parts.”
It’s the Ryzen 7 play may even decrease). So the 9800X3D and its predecessor represent the sweet spot for gaming and value for money.
McAfee said that 8-core X3D parts outperform Ryzen 9 pressure on 9800X3D stock levels.
Analysis: Broken Arrow? Barely…
In short, don’t expect the Ryzen 9800X3D to be more widely available for a while, although as we approach the second quarter of 2025, things should improve and the processor may well populate the shelves in larger sizes number.
Back to AMD’s criticism of Intel, it’s pretty harsh to use a term like “horrible” to describe a rival product. Is the Arrow Lake office really that terrible? Well, the launch wasn’t a disaster, but it was disappointing, especially since gaming performance didn’t live up to Intel’s promises due to multiple issues.
That said, Intel’s patches – which have now been rolled out for Arrow Lake except for one last measure – don’t help much, if at all, at least according to Tom’s Hardware’s (limited) testing. Something we’ll have to check out ourselves, mind you, so take this with a lot of caution at this point.
Either way, there’s no denying that the Arrow Lake desktop has been disrupted since launch, and the problem is that this has happened against a backdrop of more serious instability issues with previous Core CPU lines. of Intel (13th and 14th) on the desktop. . These were some truly nasty gremlins in the making, and although Intel patched them late last year, this whole episode was a very dark cloud for 2024 for Team Blue – with considerable reputational damage.
So even though this episode has nothing to do with Arrow Lake – which doesn’t suffer from these instability issues – it still casts a deep shadow over Intel’s latest desktop line and the separate issues associated with it. to these chips.
In short, it’s a complicated time for Intel in the processor world, and AMD not doing anything isn’t much of a surprise. Although, as we said, “horrible” goes a little too far and plays a bit gleefully on Intel’s other mishaps of late.
It’s worth noting that AMD isn’t entirely free of flaws with its current generation processors, as the Ryzen 9000 launched to some disappointment with its generational rise, again particularly for gaming – although the 9800X3D has gone a long way to solving this problem. The only problem is that you can’t buy the thing right now, a situation that’s clearly not going to change any time soon.
