AMD's Frank Azor slams Intel Arrow Lake-S as "horrible", blames Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages on weak competition

There is no denying that Intel's Arrow Lake-S lineup, with the Core Ultra 9 285K at the helm, was a monumental disappointment for gaming despite commendable efficiency and productivity gains. This has resulted, as AMD's Frank Azor revealed in an interview with Tom's Hardware, in higher-than-usual demand for AMD's recently launched Ryzen 7 9800X3D Zen 5 chip.

But that's not all that Frank Azor had to say. In a dig at the blue camp, Frank outright termed the Arrow Lake-S parts as "horrible" - showing no hesitation in voicing his disappointment at the lack of competition put forth by Intel. "We knew we built a great part. We didn't know the competitor had built a horrible one", he claimed. Frank further added that it was primarily this fact that had led to AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D suffer from supply shortages.

Although Intel had promised to release microcode updates to fix the abysmal gaming performance that failed to live up to Intel's claims, the general consensus seems to indicate that Intel's updates have, in reality, made the situation worse in certain cases with only marginal improvements in others that fails to close the gap with even last-gen counterparts. Of course, it is hard to deny the efficiency and productivity improvements that Intel has managed to squeeze out, but that hardly makes up for its shoddy gaming performance, which is inferior enough to drive away potential customers. Even more so, when considering the impressive gaming performance that AMD managed to pull off with its Ryzen 7 9800X3D chip.

And that, is exactly what appears to be happening, with AMD's Ryzen 9 9800X3D vastly outselling competing products from Intel. Those of us who are happy with switching sides to AMD will likely have to deal with shortages for a while longer since AMD had not forecasted demand of this extent. As executive David McAfee stated, AMD is hard at work ramping up production. However, with the complexity of manufacturing processors, customers will likely have to wait another 3-4 months for supply to catch up with demand.