AMD CPUs in 2022: Zen 4 in Second Half, Ryzen 7 5800X3D with V-Cache by Spring

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One of the things I look forward to every year is whether the major companies I write about are prepared to showcase their upcoming products in advance – because the year starts with the annual CES trade show, this is the perfect place. A company that’s able to present its 12-month portfolio comes across as confident in its ability to deliver, and it also gets the rest of us salivating at the prospect of next-generation hardware. This time around AMD steps up to the plate to talk about its new V-Cache CPU coming soon, and its new Zen 4 platform coming in the second half of the year.

Now with V-Cache! One Sole CPU: Ryzen 7 5800X3D

Every CPU has levels of internal memory, known as cache, which starts as a bank of ‘Level 1’ fast but small memory, rising up to a ‘Level 2’ medium-sized medium speed memory, and then a ‘Level 3’ larger sized slower memory. Beyond this there’s the main DDR memory, which is super big, but super slow in comparison – main memory is 100x slower to access, but can hold a lot more data.

Last year AMD announced that it had been working on stacked onboard memory in the form of cache. This V-Cache concept took one of the standard 8 core chiplets from the Ryzen 5000 series, which already had 32 MB of L3 cache, and stacked on top of it another 64 MB of L3 cache, giving a total of 96 MB.

Stacking chips is difficult, and AMD has been working with TSMC to productize this advanced packaging technique.

The main 8-core chiplet, built on TSMC 7nm, measures 82 mm[sup]2[/sup]. This extra stacked chiplet is only 36 mm[sup]2[/sup], and sits directly above the cache already on the chip, so it does not cover the cores. The extra 64 MB of L3 cache chiplet is manufactured on a version of TSMC 7nm that is optimized for cache density, and so AMD has placed 64 MB on top of 32 MB directly. The cores are not covered for thermal reasons – the cores are where the power is used, and so thermal spaces are placed on top to make the top of the combined chip fully flat.

AMD stated last year that it would be manufacturing consumer and enterprise versions of this increased cache in 2021 for launch in 2022. At the Data Center event last year in November, AMD announced the version that would go into servers, and called it Milan X. For consumers, AMD is announcing today what this increased cache version of Ryzen looks like. Introducing, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

AMD is only going to launch a single Ryzen version of its V-Cache technology, using the Ryzen 7 5800X as a base. This means the chip is 8 cores, 16 threads, and 105 W TDP just like the regular R7 5800X, but with 96 MB of L3 cache now rather than 32 MB. It will run at 3.4 GHz Base, 4.5 GHz boost, be overclockable, and work in AMD 400-series and 500-series motherboards.
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