u/amjadalikhan0505

At Computex, Tom's Hardware asked AMD's David McAfee directly: why launch the Ryzen 7 7700X3D on Zen 4 instead of doing a six-core Zen 5 X3D? His answer was a carefully hedged non-denial — he said a Ryzen 5 9600X3D is "maybe something we look at doing… later this year."

The supply angle he gave is actually interesting: six-core X3D dies "don't naturally occur as much as eight-core products," which explains why the 7600X3D has been a limited-run Micro Center exclusive. It's not that AMD doesn't want to make them — it's that the die allocation math doesn't favor it. He also said the choice to go eight-core with the 7700X3D came from gamer preference, even though he admitted the gaming delta between 6c and 8c "isn't huge across a broad range of titles."

If the 9600X3D lands in the $200–$250 range, it'd be the cheapest AM5 X3D entry point yet. McAfee specifically called out how the large L3 cache helps compensate for slower or single-channel memory, which matters a lot in budget builds where you're skimping on RAM speed.

Worth noting: the 7600X3D just started selling on Amazon (was Micro Center-only), so AMD is clearly trying to open up access to budget X3D. This feels like a logical continuation of that.

I'm skeptical we'll see it before Q4 given how vague McAfee was, but it's clearly on the roadmap in some form. Curious whether it'd actually move the needle vs. just grabbing the 7700X3D at $330.

Does a sub-$250 Zen 5 X3D chip change your upgrade calculus for AM5, or is the 7700X3D already good enough at its price?

TL;DR: AMD VP hinted a six-core Zen 5 X3D (likely 9600X3D) could come later this year. Not confirmed. Supply constraints explain why it hasn't happened yet. If it lands around $200–$250, it'd be the cheapest AM5 X3D chip by a margin

So this is a surprisingly interesting engineering story buried under what looks like a nostalgia product announcement.

TSMC discontinued the original SoIC hybrid-bonding process it used to stack the 96MB L3 cache on the 5800X3D. That process is just gone. AMD couldn't fab another batch even if they wanted to. So instead of quietly killing the chip, they apparently went and re-validated the entire silicon interconnect and power-sharing architecture to work with TSMC's second-gen stacking process.

The result: the new Anniversary Edition is physically built differently at the packaging level but ships with the exact same cache configuration, clockspeeds, and 105W TDP as the original. No performance delta, no thermals change. From a gaming benchmark standpoint you'd never know the difference.

The one tangible bonus: AMD bundles a Carbice Ice Pad with it — a carbon-based thermal interface material specifically designed to handle the heat concentration that comes with stacking silicon. Anyone who's dealt with the 5800X3D's hot spot behavior will appreciate that inclusion.

What I'm genuinely curious about is whether the yield story is different on the new process. The original had some notorious quality variance. Would be interesting to see if this revision is cleaner from a consistency standpoint.

TL;DR: TSMC killed the packaging process that made the original 5800X3D possible, so AMD rebuilt the chip's stacking architecture from scratch using a newer method. Performance is identical. Comes with a thermal pad now.