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So what? A bunch of people asked for it, there's nothing wrong with them deciding to give their customers what they wanted.
The target market is the kind of person who upgrades their 4090 to a 5090, probably.
If you're gaming, you'll see a pretty major difference. Otherwise, probably not worth it.
There never was any technological limitation in putting the v-cache in both CCDs. For the 7xxx, there was an incentive to NOT do so because both CCDs would be limited in clock speed compared to the non v-cache version, so a hypothetical 7950X3D2 would lose out to the 7950X and 7950X3D by 10-20% in the majority of workstation applications and not be any faster in gaming. AMD knew they would get shit on if they released a 7950X3D2 because it would have been an objectively worse processor than the 7950X3D for 99% of the market. The 9xxx series solves this problem due to the rearranged v-cache, allowing the X3D CCDs to clock almost as high as the standard CCDs. There will be minimal performance penalties on workstation applications that aren't v-cache sensitive while providing a minor boost in applications that are. Now that there no longer is a supply shortage of X3D CCDs, they may as well use the extra chips to make a halo product purely for milking some extra money out of enthusiasts and keeping the attention on AMD. There was no extra engineering or technological progress made in the creation of the 9950X3D2.
Unless you need GPU PCI-E 5.0 and/or Thunderbolt 4, X870 is a downgrade from X670.
Slightly different logistically as nVidia is trying to sell as many top tier chips at a premium as possible before the "defective" chips are released and potentially put downward price pressure on the top chips. Every 9950X3D2 sold is one less 9950X3D or 9800X3D that could be sold, and that matters during the initial launch and supply shortage that seems to occur with every launch these days.
Neutered is giving it the wrong representation; there was nothing neutered about the 9950X3D. The 9950X3D2 is physically a different hardware configuration. You're not wrong in calling it a cash grab, but this is nothing like disabling cores and then selling an unlocked version later.
So basically, you're mad at AMD for making smart business choices. A 7950X3D2 would have painted a giant bullseye on AMD's back for haters to jump on- your market wouldn't have been worth the negative publicity.
You keep calling it a blunder and all these other negative connotations. It's not when it's the commercially successful strategy. It might not work for you and others like you, just like nVidia's $2000+ flagship GPUs are a major disappointment to those that enjoyed the $600 flagships of the past, but it doesn't matter how you feel. You feeling disappointed does not equal a mistake on AMD's part. The 9xxxX3D launch was successful and it took a few months for supply to match demand. A 9950X3D2 would have hindered supply.
I think it's more simple than that - they were looking for minimum viable coverage for a launch with the aim to avoid the inevitable collective yawn, much like the reception of the Intel KS chips. With Zen 6 around the corner, this will probably end up being a low volume niche part...
Do you have any opinion on which sites got samples and the ones that did not?
maybe the 9950X3D2 is good at this,
That tracks...but how many people are running a RAG box with a good gpu and a consumer class cpu?
What's that for anyway?
Perhaps pick one or three per major language/region....
RAG?
RAG is ideal for smaller models. So this could help someone running local AI inference get better performance will less vram.
Right but....I meant; what do you actually use it for?