AMD launched 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 an iPhone launch, but not a new CPU (albeit on a smaller scale than with an Apple product, of course).
This is how popular AMD’s beefy Ryzen 3rd-gen chips have become, apparently – at least in the Japanese market.
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As Wccftech reports, 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 did sell out across major retailers in the US, UK and Europe when 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.
In all this, though, perhaps the most concerning thing is some of the ETAs European retailers are quoting for stock coming back in – like the end of December, or even the end of January. So it looks like we are facing the prospect of a repeat of the stock shortages that 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 crushing Intel’s rival chips, as we recently heard from Amazon, and earlier today from a big European retailer.
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