If you're on the Socket AM4 platform, AMD is never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you; never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye, never gonna tell a lie, and hurt you. The company is reportedly giving finishing touches to a firecracker of a sub-$200 chip for price-conscious gamers, the Ryzen 5 5500X3D. That's right, AMD is bringing 3D V-cache technology to the mid-range, with a new 6-core processor based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, but enjoying the gaming performance boost from 96 MB of L3 cache on tap.

AMD already has a 6-core X3D Socket AM4 chip, the Ryzen 5 5600X3D, which joined the product stack a couple of years after AMD's original Ryzen 7 5800X3D took the gaming PC processor scene by storm, matching the then swanky new Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake" despite being based on an older-generation "Zen 3" architecture. Not much else is known about the 5500X3D, except that it could have a lower clock speed than the 5600X3D. Back in November 2023, when news of the 5700X3D first hit the scene, the 5500X3D was rumored to be a 6-core/12-thread chip with 3.00 GHz base frequency and 4.00 GHz maximum boost, compared to the 3.30 GHz base and 4.40 GHz boost frequency of the 5600X3D. Given that AMD launched the 5600X3D at $230, AMD could target a sub-$200 price point to wow gamers on AM4, such as $199.Why is AMD continuing to launch Socket AM4 chips well into the mid-2020s? We're no strangers to love, you know the rules and so do I—the new Socket AM5 lacks backwards-compatibility with DDR4, and as such AMD would be abandoning a large value-conscious desktop market to Intel, which supports DDR4 on even its 14th Gen Core processors. While AMD can't backport Zen 4 to AM4, it can do the next best thing—expand Zen 3 with 3D V-cache to more market segments, and bring Zen 4 kind of gaming performance to those segments. This could probably also have something to do with AMD's wafer-supply agreement with GlobalFoundries, which provides the 12 nm client I/O die for these "new" chips.