AMD Director of Client Product Management Travis Kirsch sat down with a Japanese publication to share the backstory of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and its relaunch this year. Kirsch told MyNavi Tech+ [machine translated] that AMD CEO Lisa Su was one of the proponents of bringing back the groundbreaking X3D processor that first debuted in April 2022.
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While some may think this was a simple relaunch of a four-year-old processor, the company had to do extensive re-engineering and update its manufacturing process with TSMC just to bring it back. The decision to relaunch it was well-timed, too.
While the world is suffering from extremely high DDR5 memory prices when it finally arrived in the middle of 2026, Kirsch said that “this was planned before changes in the memory market occurred, not as a countermeasure to DDR5 shortages,” and that it was “the final gift to local users who have used our AM4 for nearly a decade, offering systems that use DDR4 the last change to upgrade their PCs.”
Beyond the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the Japanese publication also touched on AMD’s value offerings, or lack thereof. Four Ryzen 3 processors are available new today—one for AM5 and three for AM4—which raises the question of whether AMD is abandoning the entry-level market.
Kirsch said that while the company aims to offer a product for every price point, AMD is mostly focused on the premium, high-performance gaming market — we see this in the October Steam Survey results, with AMD closing in on Intel at 48.4% CPU share. As for the affordable CPU market, he said it’s no longer as big as it used to be, as laptops have taken over this segment.
Of course, any discussion with a tech executive these days would almost always touch on the memory chip shortage. “…there are things we can control and things we cannot. Market price trends are the result of everyone moving (and there’s nothing we can do about it),” Kirsch said.
“We are simply focused on providing consumers with choices in any situation. This is to ensure that consumers have the opportunity to purchase the best AMD PCs, regardless of the price.”