AMD at Computex: AM5 Until 2029, Ryzen 7700X3D and 5800X3D Anniversary Edition, Radeon RX 9070 GRE Announced

AMD took to Computex with a host of CPU and GPU announcements, including two new/old Ryzen X3D processors and the global release of the formerly China-exclusive RX 9070 GRE graphics card. Perhaps more importantly, it also underscored its commitment to the AM5 platform until 2029, some seven years after it debuted.

Let's cover off the GPU news first before we dig into the meatier CPU announcements. The RX 9070 GRE is a cut-down version of the vanilla RX 9070 with 12GB of VRAM instead of 16GB and 85 percent of the GPU cores, making it roughly 15 percent slower on average.

With an official RRP of $550, it's only eight percent cheaper than the RX 9070, which currently costs $600 for the most affordable model on retailers like Amazon and Newegg. At the moment then, the 9070 is better value (and the 9070 XT the best value), but price cuts on the GRE and price rises or supply limitations on the higher-tier cards might adjust that calculus.

The CPU announcements are more exciting to me, even though both the 7700X3D and 5800X3D Anniversary Edition were rumoured weeks ago. The new CPUs are essentially a way for AMD to choose new prices and use existing/cheaper silicon for parts that are still heavily in demand, with the 7700X3D retailing for $329 from July 16th and the 5800X3D AE for $349 from June 25th.

The 5800X3D AE offers PC builders a way to retain or buy cheaper DDR4 RAM and AM4-series motherboards while still achieving a good level of gaming performance, while the 7700X3D is a new, more affordable path to the more modern AM5 platform with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support that again retains that gaming-critical extra L3 cache common to all X3D chips.

Like the 9070 GRE, the $329 7700X3D suffers from being very close in price to its technically superior bigger brother at $342, but we have seen AMD withdraw the 5800X3D for sale around nine months after announcing the 5700X3D, so perhaps they'll follow a similar trajectory here. If you missed our original reporting, the 7700X3D is exactly the same as the 7800X3D, but comes with a 200MHz haircut to base clocks and a 500MHz reduction to boost clocks, which should make it a few percentage points slower in CPU-limited scenes but functionally identical.

It's funny that the 5800X3D AE is more expensive than the 7700X3D despite being slower and from a prior generation, but with no real 5700X3D or original 5800X3D stock on the market, AMD isn't really obligated to be aggressive on price here.

The confirmed 2029 date for AM5 support is also welcome news. The previous-gen AM4 platform has survived for longer than even AMD expected, a span of some seven Intel motherboard generations with five different sockets over the past 10 years. There was no news of a new 900-series motherboards, despite rumours ahead of the show, so it seems likely that we'll see that new generation of motherboards and Zen 6 processors sometime next year.

What do you make of the announcements? Let me know in the comments below.