Is The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Going To Be AMD’s New Performance King?

In case you missed the news on Thursday, AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is a real product, and it's coming to market next month for an as-yet-undisclosed price. This CPU is a Socket AM5 desktop processor with fully sixteen Zen 5 CPU cores, split across two eight-core chiplets, both of which are stacked on top of a 64MB slab of SRAM cache, giving each CCD 96MB of L3 cache and the full chip some 208MB of L2+L3 cache.

Obviously, this part is going to be expensive, but it's justified by being AMD's new highest-performing desktop CPU, right? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. AMD's Jack Huynh calls it exactly that in the video where he introduces the chip, and in certain workloads (complex tasks sensitive to memory latency) it will absolutely crush any competition with its fat stacks of cache. Just take a look ...