At the recent CES exhibition, AMD launched a variety of processors and graphics cards. Among them, the Desktop has the much-anticipated Ryzen 7000 X3D version, including Ryzen 9 7950X3D, Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
Compared with the previous generation Ryzen 7 5800X3D, this time AMD provides more choices, in addition to 8 cores, there are also 12 cores and 16 cores. But the design of the X3D version this time is also rather peculiar, especially the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D.
AMD has confirmed that the above two processors only add an additional 64MB 3D Cache, which will be stacked on one of the two CCD modules. Foreign media Hardwareluxxx compiled a picture for demonstration, in which you can clearly see how the extra Cache is allocated.
As shown in the figure, there is only one CCD module in Ryzen 7 7800X3D, so the extra 64MB Cache is stacked here. But on Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D, there are 2 CCDs inside, and the 64MB Cache can only be stacked on top of one of them, which also leads to a CCD module with 32MB L3 Cache and one with 32 + 64 = 96MB Cache, The two are not equivalent.
3DCache will also affect the frequency. Even though the acceleration frequency of Ryzen 9 7950X3D / 7900X3D in the data released by AMD is the same as that of Ryzen 9 7950X / 7900X, the official has not yet clarified the CPU frequency of the CCD module stacked with 3D Cache. For how much, theoretically it will be much lower than normal, and the acceleration frequency of Ryzen 7 7800X3D is 400MHz lower.
As for this unbalanced design, some netizens pointed out that the Ryzen 7000 X3D has a large and small core architecture in disguise. The large core has 64MB Cache, but the frequency will be lower, which is suitable for running some cache-sensitive games. The CCD core of the small core is the normal cache, but the frequency is higher.
This difference will also increase the difficulty of scheduling optimization, but now AMD has strengthened cooperation with Microsoft, and updates after Windows 11 will follow this change to optimize the scheduling of games and software to ensure performance.