It’s so well established now that AMD’s 3D V-Cache X3D CPUs are the best in the business regarding gaming performance that the arrival of the company’s new Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 CPUs earlier this month was almost an afterthought. However, those hoping for an imminent AMD Ryzen 9000X3D release date look set to be disappointed as the latest rumors suggest they won’t launch until early next year.
Specifically, the expected arrival – or at least announcement by AMD – of what look set to be the best gaming CPUs of their time has been earmarked for CES 2025.
What is CES 2025? It’s the largest tech trade show in the world, and where we’ll be come January next year, reporting on a host of huge hardware announcements. And in terms of AMD’s product roadmap, it makes for an obvious target date to make a big splash with the launch of its latest CPUs.
As a reminder, 3D V-Cache is AMD’s system of stacking a secondary silicon wafer consisting solely of L3 cache (a small, very fast stack of memory that the CPU uses to read and write data before it has to resort to accessing much slower main system memory) right on top of the silicon chip/s that make up the rest of the CPU. This extra die more than doubles the L3 cache of the CPU, reducing the need to access memory, which is particularly beneficial for applications where it’s hard for the CPU to predict data usage patterns. That’s why it’s so beneficial for games, as human input inherently means the CPU can’t predict data usage as easily.
The X3D versions of the Ryzen 9000 chips, then, are expected to be the outright best possible CPUs for gaming as the Ryzen 9000 CPUs are already about as fast as you can get, and the extra L3 cache should provide even more performance.
What could throw a spanner in AMD’s works is how gaming performance turns out to be for Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra 200 CPUs that are coming out in October 2024. While they’re not expected to be the very best for gaming, there could be a surprise extra level of speed that means all of a sudden it’s Intel’s latest that is the fastest option out there in the run-up to the holiday shopping and sales season.
Regardless, the source of this latest rumor is regular X-based leaker @9950pro who has a strong track record of being right with their leaks. Their latest post simply says “Ryzen 9000X3D CES 2025?🤔,” which we’re fairly sure doesn’t need any further interpretation. Notably, the phrasing and question mark hammer home that this is just a rumor and we could very well still see AMD launch the Ryzen 9000X3D range before the year is out.
For more on AMD’s latest CPUs, check out why AMD CPU owners might want to perform a Windows update to get the best gaming performance.