AMD's unreleased Ryzen 9 5950X3D & Ryzen 9 5900X3D 3D V-Cache CPUs featuring up to 192 MB of cache have been spotted during GamerNexus's tour at AMD's test and engineering campus in Austin, Texas.
AMD's Unreleased Zen 3 & Zen 4 Ryzen CPUs With Dual 3D V-Cache CCD's Spotted: Ryzen 9 5950X3D & 5900X3D With Up To 192 MB Stacked Cache
AMD has officially introduced a total of four 3D V-Cache CPUs for its client desktop platform. These include a single chip for the AM4 and three chips for the AM5 socket. There are reports of a second chip launching for the AM4 socket but it looks like AMD had more chips planned out during its early prototyping days.
During a visit to AMD's Austin, Texas, campus, the folks over at GamersNexus were shown several prototypes and unreleased samples of AMD's 3D V-Cache CPUs that didn't make it to launch. These include several Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" designs and two Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" designs. The Zen 3 CPUs in this list include the Ryzen 9 5950X3D and the Ryzen 9 5900X3D, featuring 16 cores and 12 cores in total, respectively.
What's unique about these two AMD 3D V-Cache CPUs is that all of these unreleased chips feature a 3D V-Cache stack on both of their CCDs. This allows the CPUs to carry up to 192 MB of L3 cache. Each stack offers 64 MB of L3 cache for a total of 128 MB and the rest of the 64 MB cache comes in the form of 32 MB standard L3 configured within each CCD that's shared across all cores. Zen 3 had 1 MB of L2 cache so it is easy to tell that the chips running here are Ryzen 5000 parts.
In terms of clock speeds, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X3D is configured at 3.5 GHz base & 4.1 GHz boost while the Ryzen 9 5900X3D is configured at 3.5 GHz base and 4.4 GHz boost clocks. Now these are much lower clock speeds than the standard Non V-Cache parts which operate at up to 4.9 GHz and 4.8 GHz boost clocks. But the reduction is not only due to voltage / thermal restrictions but also the fact that these are early prototypes that were far from a retail launch.
Following are all of the 3D V-Cache CPUs that have been released so far:
- Ryzen 7 5800X3D 8-Core (Zen 3 - 96 MB L3 Cache - Single CCD V-Cache / AM4)
- Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8- Core (Zen 4 - 96 MB L3 Cache - Single CCD V-Cache / AM5)
- Ryzen 9 7900X3D 12-Core (Zen 4 - 128 MB L3 Cache - Single CCD V-Cache / AM5)
- Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16-Core (Zen 4 - 128 MB L3 Cache - Single CCD V-Cache / AM5)
Later in its planning phase, AMD figured out that a single CCD stack offers the best balance in terms of overall performance and efficiency. Users who want to go the dual-CCD route will have to give up on standard performance without noticing a huge gain in performance versus a singular 3D V-Cache CCD.
So it all boils down to landing the perfect value and performance and that's where we are today with the Ryzen 9 7900X3D SKUs. It is possible that as more cache-intensive bottlenecks are discovered and the technology becomes more useful, we could get a dual-CCD solution but for now, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the best example of what makes 3D V-Cache so great for gaming.
