AMD's new Ryzen 9000 CPUs are reportedly suffering the 'worst launch since Bulldozer' thanks to 'disastrous' sales

AMD's new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 CPUs have taken a bit of a beating when it comes to the broader review community. But they weren't that bad, more slightly underwhelming in gaming than in any way broken. Our own chip-fancier Nick is a bit more positive that most (despite his own travails during testing) and points out the Ryzen 9 9950X in particular is pretty killer for productivity apps and anything that feeds on lots of threads.

Nevertheless, reports are mounting that AMD's latest CPUs are absolutely bombing in the sales charts. The major caveat here is that these reports largely center on individual CPU sales for the DIY market, as opposed to chips going into fully built rigs. And the DIY market is positively puny by comparison.

Still, as a measure of sentiment rather than outright volumes, DIY sales are indicative. And those indications are reportedly bad, as in really bad. According to YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed, the patchy reception of Zen 5 «has had a disastrous effect on sales» in Australia.

The channel claims sales of the chips in Australia are so bad the «figures are hard to believe» with retailers and distributors painting a picture of «worst Ryzen launch since the very start of Ryzen as a whole.»

Hardware Unboxed also points to sales figures from German etailer Mindfactory. To cut a long story short, Mindfactory's publicly published figures show that Zen 4 sold twice as many units in the first week after its launch two years ago as Zen 5 has managed in an entire month.

Bear in mind Zen 4 and the Ryzen 7000 series required the then-new AM5 socket and thus a whole new motherboard and memory platform, making the upgrade much more complicated and expensive than Zen 5, which drops straight into existing AM5 boards. Okay, maybe some DIYers are waiting for new chipsets which have yet to arrive, but that's surely a niche within niche. 

Over on another YouTube channel, Moore's Law is Dead, you can absorb similar reports, with the headline claim that Zen 5