The Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the current best CPU for gaming, launched just a little while ago and its impeccable performance has already caused shortages.
AMD says the level of demand is partially down to Intel's launch of the rather underwhelming Arrow Lake. As told to a writer at Tom's Hardware in a roundtable interview with AMD executives, AMD blames part of the severe demand for its current best chip on Intel launching a mediocre product in the hotly anticipated Arrow Lake.
Okay, AMD put it a bit more harshly than that, saying «We knew we built a great part. We didn't know the competitor had built a horrible one.» On this, we tested out both the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and Intel Core Ultra 5 245K back in October and they are certainly underwhelming, though we wouldn't quite call them horrible.
The former CPU is great for productivity needs but beaten out in gaming by cheaper, older AMD CPUs. The latter is a strong budget choice for content creation, but the use-case is far more niche than one might expect from a competitive Intel CPU.
However, a 'just okay' launch of a hotly anticipated set of CPUs, especially when you consider the CPU instabilities that still negatively impact the consumer view on Intel, these chips needed to be better to compete with AMD, which is currently performing really well.