Agent47 Posted January 4, 2022 Posted January 4, 2022 AMD’s Zen architecture propelled it to the top of the desktop PC market, but Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs have now taken the lead on our list of Best CPUs for gaming. Not to be outgunned, today AMD teased renders of the coming 5nm Zen 4 chips that will come with Ryzen 7000 branding and a radical new design that will drop into the new AM5 LGA socket. In addition, AMD demoed a Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ chip running Halo Infinite with all cores surpassing 5.0 GHz during the benchmark. AMD says the Ryzen 7000 processors will arrive in the second half of the year. We have more in-depth details below. In the interim, AMD will fire back at Alder Lake this spring with its Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor. This new chip features AMD’s new 3D V-Cache tech that packs a whopping 96MB of L3 cache onto a single processor via 3D-stacked SRAM, which AMD says will boost gaming by an average of 15% across a selected range of game titles at 1080p. AMD says the 5800X3D will be the fastest gaming chip in the world, and it provided its own benchmark results against Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K to prove it. AMD also announced its Ryzen 6000 ‘Rembrandt’ series mobile chips with the Zen 3+ CPU architecture, RDNA 2 graphics, and the 6nm process. You can read about those chips here. The X3D Era Begins - Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is the first AMD chip that will come to the consumer market with its 3D V-Cache technology, though AMD already uses this tech on its Milan-X processors for the data center. As a quick refresher, 3D V-Cache leverages a novel new technique that uses hybrid bonding to fuse an additional 64MB of 7nm SRAM cache stacked vertically atop the Ryzen compute chiplet, thus tripling the amount of L3 cache per Ryzen die. You can read the deep dive details here and here. As AMD CEO Lisa Su demoed at Computex last year, 3D V-Cache can enable up to 192MB of L3 cache on a single consumer chip. However, the 192MB of L3 only applies to Ryzen models with two dies, and AMD’s new Ryzen 7 5800X3D only has a single die. That means it comes with 64MB of cache stacked atop the 32MB of cache already present on the chip, thus yielding 96MB of L3 cache. It remains unclear if AMD will bring another ‘X3D’ model based on the higher-end Ryzen 9 5900X or 5950X to market in the future. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D comes with the same eight Zen 3 cores and 16 threads as the standard Ryzen 7 5800X, but has a lower 3.4-GHz base and 4.5 GHz boost frequency. That means AMD has reduced the base clock by 400 MHz and trimmed 200 MHz off the boost frequency. The chip will drop into existing 400- and 500-series motherboards, offering a hassle-free upgrade path for AMD users as they wait for Zen 4. AMD hasn’t announced pricing yet, but as we’ll explain below, it could be tricky. The 5800X3D’s lower clock speeds are an inevitable tradeoff — AMD stacks the additional SRAM directly in the center of the compute die to isolate it from the heat-generating cores on the sides of the chiplet. However, due to the need for a uniform mating surface with the integrated heat spreader, AMD has to use silicon shims on top of the cores to provide an even surface for the top of the chiplet. Silicon is an excellent thermal conductor but it will inevitably trap at least some heat, thus resulting in less thermal headroom. It also consumes more power. That’s likely the source of the slightly lower clock speeds, but as you can see below, the net result is a big win for gaming performance. AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Gaming Benchmarks AMD’s stacked SRAM delivers 2TB/s of throughput between the two dies and minimal latency impact. Along with the additional cache capacity that’s kept closer to the cores, it leads to the types of performance gains that we would expect from the jump to a new chip architecture. Above we can see AMD’s internal test results, and as with all vendor-provided benchmarks, take them with the requisite grain of salt.
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