While AMD announced that it was delaying the availability of the Ryzen 9000 Series until Mid-August, it never really told the whole story as to why it was doing so, leaving many of us assuming that there were some “performance” anomalies with the current batch. Now, it’s coming to light that its “full quality expectations” was supposedly just a typo on the IHS.
According to the good Dr. Ian Cutress at TechTechPotato, AMD’s production plant had a bit of a hiccup and incorrectly labelled the Ryzen 7 9700X as a Ryzen 9. Not only that, but Tom’s Hardware also reported that the mislabelling issue seemed to extend to some units of the Ryzen 5 9600X. For the uninitiated, only the 9950X and 9900X have the privilege of bearing the “9” moniker.
typo on the packaging
— 𝐷𝑟. 𝐼𝑎𝑛 𝐶𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 (@IanCutress) July 25, 2024
At this point, it is unclear if the Ryzen 9 mislabelling issue is isolated to just a handful of units or if an entire batch of them was affected. However, seeing how they’re etched into the IHS via laser engraving, perhaps fixing them may be more tedious than complicated. As for whether or not there was any performance issues with these, someone did manage to sneak in a test or two with the 9700X and at a glance, there doesn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary.
So, with all that has been said and done, the important question for AMD would be: if a typo really all that was wrong with the CPUs, was this all really necessary?
(Source: Dr Ian Cutress via X, Tom’s Hardware, Videocardz)
