96 MB of L3 3D V-Cache Designed For Gamers

The level of competition in the desktop CPU market has rarely been as fierce as in the last two years. When AMD brought the Ryzen processor to market, Intel was forced to respond, both of which have consistently fought in multiple areas, including core count, IPC performance, frequency, and ultimate performance. With constant competition to improve products, win the competition and meet the changing needs of customers, the two companies are sometimes off the beaten track and are developing wilder technologies in search of their competitiveness. ..

For AMD, one such development effort culminated in 3DV-Cache packaging technology, which stacks layers of the L3 cache on top of the existing CCD L3 cache. Additional cache is beneficial for performance, but large amounts of SRAM, well, bigAMD has been working on ways to place more L3 cache on CPU chiplets without completely blowing away the die size. The result is stacked V-Cache technology. This allows you to create additional caches separately and carefully place them on top of the chips you use as part of the processor.

For the consumer market, AMD’s first V-Cache-equipped product is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Marketed as the fastest game processor on the market today, AMD’s unique chip features 8 cores / 16 threads of processing power and a whopping 96MB of L3 cache. Basically, it’s built on top of the already established Ryzen 7 5800X processor, and AMD’s goal is to take the game’s performance to the next level by adding an additional L3 cache to the 5800X3D.

I got AMD’s new gaming chip and tested the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with the CPU suite and gaming to see if it was as good as AMD claims.

AMD Ryzen 7 58003XD: with 3DV cache

Previously announced at CES2022, the Ryzen 7 58003XD is probably the most interesting of all Ryzen-based chips on the market since Zen debuted in 2017. There is a 64MB L3 cache layer on top of the existing 32MB L3 cache on the Ryzen 7 5800X.

To give an overview of the 3D V-Cache framework, AMD uses a copper-to-copper direct bonding process, stacking an additional layer of 64MB L3 cache on top of the existing 32MB L3 cache on the die. .. AMD claims that comparing the Ryzen 9 5900X (12c / 16t) with a 12-core 3D chiplet prototype chip will improve game performance by an average of 15%. It’s hard to tell if AMD’s claim is based solely on a 12-core design, or if this level of performance gain is linear when the number of cores used is small.

Innovative bonding technology that fuses 3D V-Cache with an additional L3 cache on top of an existing L3 cache will definitely improve performance given how important L3 cache levels are for a particular game title. Obviously it’s an interesting way to achieve. AMD also claims that the high level of L3 cache improves the performance of multithreaded workloads such as video encoding.

The vertical (V) cache design is based on the same TSMC 7 nm manufacturing process as CCD, with a decimation process that is part of TSMC’s technology designed to counteract the thermal complications that occur. Bridging the gap between the 32MB on-die L3 cache and the vertically stacked 64MB L3 cache is the base of structural silicon, which directly bonds copper to copper and connects them with silicon VIA and TSV.

Looking at where it’s located in the stack, the Ryzen 75800X3D is clearly the same price as the Ryzen 95900X, benefiting from four additional Zen 3 cores and eight additional threads. Ryzen 7 5800X3D The fundamental frequency is 400MHz lower than the Ryzen 7 5800X and the turbo frequency is 200MHz lower. This can be a power limiting factor as the additional L3 cache produces power.

The new chip isn’t too far from the Ryzen 7 5800X in terms of raw computing throughput, as 3D V-Cache is primarily designed to improve the performance of game titles. In this area, the Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 95 900X have a slight advantage, with both models having higher core frequencies. Still, as mentioned earlier, real bread and butter are in games that benefit from the performance of the game, or at least the additional level of L3 cache.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D: Memory overclocking support, but not core

Ryzen 7 5800X3D supports memory overclocking, allowing users to overclock Infinity Fabric interconnects to complement this, but AMD has disabled core overclocking, so it’s compatible with AMD’s Precision Boost Overclocking feature. there is not. This has disappointed many users, but it is a trade-off related to 3D V-Cache.

Specifically, overclocking limits result in voltage limits (1.35 V VCore) due to the use of that packaging technique. The dense V-cache, like the L3 cache already built into the Zen 3 chiplet, does not seem to be able to handle the excess juice.

As a result, instead of CPU overclocking, the biggest thing users can do to impact higher performance with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is to use faster DDR4 memory with lower latency, such as the excellent DDR4-3600 kit. That is. These settings are also known sweet spots of AMD’s Infinity Fabric Interconnect set by AMD.

Looking at the current state of the desktop processor market, by the end of the year, it looks promising for users with a wealth of choices. The main battles in current game performance are AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D ($ 450) and Intel’s 12th Generation Core Series option, with the Core i9-12900K leading the team Intel’s pricing.

Perhaps the most interesting argument is that both current generation products from both AMD and Intel will buy new processors because they offer excellent gaming performance overall. It’s difficult to choose a mainstream desktop processor that doesn’t work well with most graphics cards. Other than combining a flagship chip with a flagship graphics card, computing, productivity, and content creation applications can suffer performance degradation. We know that AMD will release the latest Zen4 core later this year, and we are looking forward to advances and advances in IPC performance.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache is new and exciting, and the battle for the title of “fastest game processor” is constantly changing, especially when it comes to game performance. Based on the existing AM4 platform, AMD has provided a state-of-the-art design on a platform that users are familiar with, but the biggest challenge is to fulfill AMD’s claims, which is what this review is aiming for. ..

Finally, regardless of how the 5800X3D is currently working, AMD’s Stack V Cache technology is not a one-off product. AMD recently announced that at some point in the cycle there will be a variation of Zen 4 with 3D V-Cache. We also announced the same for Zen5, which is scheduled for 2024.

The test uses:

For comparison, all other chips were run on Windows 10 and 11 (for the latest processors) as tests listed in the benchmark database Bench.