Here's When AMD's Exciting Zen 3 Refresh With 3D V-Cache Might Hit Retail
AMD was very upfront about the fact that its stacked 3D V-cache was headed to its current-generation Ryzen 5000 series in an upcoming refresh, it just has not divulged exactly when that will happen. It could be very soon, if the latest rumor turns out to be true. As in, an announcement could come in January, followed by a retail launch soon after.
That's precisely the case, according to @greymon55, a popular tipster on Twitter that has been building up a pretty solid track record. The leaker claims "Zen 3D" entered the mass production phase earlier this month and that it will likely take just a few months longer before the chips find their way to retail shelves. High-tech Valentine's Day gift, anyone?
"As I said before, ZEN3D is already in mass production in the middle of this month, and it usually takes at least 3 months to get to market, so I'm leaning toward it being announced in January and available in February," the leaker wrote on Twitter.
That certainly sounds plausible, considering AMD is also on track to launch its Zen 4 lineup next year. Its Zen 3D chips will serve as a sort of stop-gap solution to compete with Intel's Alder Lake lineup, which recently released to retail. One advantage AMD has is that its upcoming chips should work just fine in existing AM4 motherboards following a BIOS update.
Back in June, AMD boss Dr. Lisa Su held up a prototype of a Ryzen 9 5900X processor infused with 3D V-cache (shown at the top of this article). AMD stacked 64MB of 7-nanometer SRAM cache directly on top of each core complex die (CCD) to effectively triple the amount of high-speed L3 cache (to 192MB) that gets fed to the Zen 3 CPU cores.
AMD is promising a 15 percent performance boost in certain applications, and namely gaming. That's roughly on par with a generational performance uplift, yet in this case the chips are still based on the same Zen 3 architecture as existing Ryzen 5000 series CPUs.
Since showing off the prototype, AMD has gone on to unveil 3rd Gen EPYC server processors with 3D V-cache, which also boast three times the amount of L3 cache. Those will launch in the first quarter of 2022, adding credibility to the rumor that Ryzen 5000 CPUs with 3D V-cache are right around the corner.
