AMD showcases prototypes of unreleased Ryzen CPUs with 3D V-Cache
The company has invited the team from Gamers Nexus for a tour of their secret Ryzen labs.
The latest video from Gamers Nexus sheds light on AMD’s journey of returning into a competitive CPU space with the first Ryzen CPUs. It was a challenging road for AMD with many products entering the roadmap, but not all of them were released to the market. One of such CPU series were dual-chiplet Ryzen 5000 series with 3D V-Cache memory.
AMD actually did showcase a 12-core Zen4 CPU with 3D V-Cache during a special event back in June 2021. The company used this prototype to claim that such a design would result in 15% higher gaming performance. It took another 10 months for AMD to launch Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU with 8 cores that would eventually deliver such performance, but there was no sign of the said 12-core CPU.
During the tour at AMD Austin HQ, Gamers Nexus were shown working prototypes of what could have become the said Ryzen 9 5900X3D. Furthermore, the company was even working on a 16-core version called Ryzen 9 5950X3D. Neither of the two was released and nothing suggests they will ever be released.
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AMD Ryzen 5000 Engineering Samples with 3D V-Cache, Source: GamersNexus
Should AMD launch a 16-core SKU, we would get the first Ryzen CPU with 192MB of L3 Cache, which is even more what was implemented on Ryzen 7000X3D series with Zen4. AMD settled on 3.5 GHz base and 4.1 GHz boost for 5950X3D and 3.5 and 4.4 GHz for 5900X3D CPUs. Those were lower clocks than non-X3D counterparts due to voltage and thermal restrictions. These early prototypes were eventually abandoned, as the company figured that single 3D V-Cache dies would offer better performance.
Recently, there was a leak featuring Ryzen 5 5600X3D, a 6-core version with one chiplet and one 3D V-Cache die. Neither AMD nor any other source has mentioned that such part may be released. In fact, some claim that it will never be marketed. If that’s true then the story of 3D V-Cache on Zen3 architecture might have very well ended with 5800X3D, while AMD focuses on Zen4 Ryzen 7000X3D series.
Source via: TechPowerUP, Wccftech
