AMD finally announced pricing for its Ryzen 9950X3D2 Dual Edition flagship CPU today, with the new fastest Ryzen processor sporting an $899 MSRP in the US, £829 in the UK and €999 in Europe. That's $200 more than the original 9950X3D and $100 more than 2020's Ryzen 5950X, therefore marking a new high-water mark for AMD's consumer-grade Ryzen CPUs.
That's extremely steep, but it makes sense given that this is anything but a mainstream chip - it's a halo product created to satisfy the demands of AMD enthusiasts who wondered how much faster the already blistering 9950X3D would be if it had a 3D V-Cache on both of its CCDs. That brings total L3 cache figures to an absurd 192MB versus 128MB on the original 9950X3D, while boost clocks drop only fractionally from 5.7GHz to 5.6GHz.
These changes, plus a higher TDP (200W vs 170W) and likely some binning to find only the most performant chips, allows for measurable performance gains for the 9950X3D2 against the 9950X3D - if AMD's figures are representative. They quote around a seven percent performance uplift in a range of 3D rendering, content creation and code compilation tasks, with a 13 percent uplift in a SPEC Workstation Data Science AI and simulation workload.
It'll be fascinating to see whether the dual X3D caches have any impact on gaming performance whatsoever, as there are paltry few CPU-limited titles that benefit from more than eight cores and 16 threads. Thus far, the strategy has been to keep games on one CCD to avoid costly cross-chiplet transmissions and ensure the 3D V-Cache is used, but perhaps there are a handful of extremely heavy simulation games that could spread out across both chiplets. Another point is that the 9950X3D offers the choice between more cache on one CCD and faster cores on the other, while the 9950X3D2 only offers the former - so it's also possible the X3D2 could be slightly slower for gaming in some scenarios.
The Ryzen 9950X3D2 Dual Edition goes on sale on 22nd April, so we don't have too long to wait before the first third-party performance analyses drop.