If you’ve ever wondered what happened to AMD Ryzen 3, the CPU maker now has an answer for you. In short, AMD doesn’t see these quad-core CPUs as a prime focus any more, saying it considers super-fast gaming chips to be its bread and butter in the Ryzen world now.
Speaking to Japanese site Tech Plus, AMD director of client product management, Travis Kirsch was asked if the company was abandoning the Ryzen 3 lineup. While Kirsch didn’t provide a firm yes or no, he did explain AMD’s reasoning for the lack of new Ryzen 3 products.
“To be honest, the market size for Ryzen 3 in the component market isn’t that big,” said Kirsch [machine translated]. “Of course, we always try to offer several SKUs for customers who want that lower price range, but that’s not our main focus.” Kirsch added that, “we consider the premium, high-performance gaming market to be our main battleground.”
You can easily pick up a 6-core Ryzen 5 chip from any of AMD’s latest CPU generations, but the budget quad-core Ryzen 3 range hasn’t survived much past the Zen 2 era. It’s a very different landscape from when AMD produced budget Duron and Sempron chips alongside its Athlon processors and Phenom CPUs.
“I was a product manager during the Athlon era,” recalled Kirsch, “and back then it accounted for a large part of the component market.” Times have changed, though. “It’s not such a big market any more,” Kirsch explains. “I think a lot of that is due to the rise of laptops. In other words, laptops have taken over those price ranges. That’s why our current focus is on premium performance models.”
Kirsch also brings up the design challenge of producing cost-effective quad-core chips with integrated GPUs. “For value processors like the Ryzen 3, the CCD+IOD configuration isn’t suitable (in terms of price). The key to the Ryzen 3 is that it also needs integrated graphics.”
So there you go. If you want a cheap AMD CPU, don’t hang around waiting for a new Ryzen 3, there probably won’t be one. Besides, you arguably don’t need a quad-core CPU range when you can pick up a 6-core Ryzen 5 5500 for £79.99 now anyway.
