AMD Ryzen 9 3950X going on sale in Japan looked a bit like an iPhone launch
People queuing around the block (and buyers even tried to wait overnight)
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
AMDlaunched its new Ryzen 9 3950X processor in Japan over the weekend, where the flagship was greeted by lengthy queues outside retail stores, and folks even trying to line up overnight. This is the sort of thing you might expect from aniPhonelaunch, but not a new CPU (albeit on a smaller scale than with an Apple product, of course).
This is how popular AMD’s beefyRyzen 3rd-genchips have become, apparently – at least in the Japanese market.
AsWccftechreports, come launch day, which was November 30 in Japan, PC enthusiasts who wanted one of the 3950X chips were required by retail stores to wait in line, having to get a ‘purchase ticket’ before queuing up to actually receive their 16-core CPU.
Indeed, the editor of Akiba-PC.watch was told by some shopkeepers that buyers were trying to queue up to buy the CPU the night before, but they were prevented from doing so, and told to come back early in the morning.
Hot seller
We didn’t see anything like this over in the US or UK, of course, although the Ryzen 9 3950X didsell out across major retailers in the US, UK and Europewhen it was launched last week.
In Tokyo, a whole bunch of retailers witnessed queues for the new Ryzen 9 3950X, and Wccftech shared a number of photos showing these lines. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the shops opened, their entire stock of the 3950X was sold out.
And that’s despite retailers selling the processor at 100,000 Japanese Yen (that’s around $913, £705 or AU$1,345), considerably more than the recommended asking price.
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
In all this, though, perhaps the most concerning thing is some of the ETAs European retailers are quoting for stock coming back in – like theend of December, or even the end of January. So it looks like we are facing the prospect of a repeat of the stock shortagesthat were witnessed with the 3900X, which were a distinctly prolonged affair.
The good news for high-end processor hunters is that at least AMD’s 3900X is now well-stocked everywhere, although those inventory issues only eased very recently.
Meanwhile, the buzz from the CPU world is a pretty much constant noise revolving around how AMD Ryzen processors are crushingIntel’s rival chips, as werecently heard from Amazon, andearlier today from a big European retailer.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
Trying to get the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU? It seems only scalpers have it and they’re jacking up the price
As if Intel didn’t have enough to worry about, Nvidia might be about to jump into the PC processor market
This super-cheap HP Victus 15 gaming laptop just dropped to its lowest price yet
