Gamers Nexus Explores Unreleased AMD 3D V-Cache CPUs in Video Feature

Gamers Nexus has released a video feature exploring the history of AMD's Zen CPU architecture. Editor-in-chief and founder Stephen Burke visited Team Red's test and engineering campus in Austin, Texas. While a longer and more in-depth coverage of his lab tour will be released at a later date, the video includes an interesting segment covering unreleased hardware. The Gamers Nexus crew spent some time looking at several examples of current and past generation AMD 3D V-Cache CPUs.

Prototype Ryzen 7000-series Zen 4 designs were shown off by principal engineer Amit Mehra and technical team member Bill Alverson. They also brought out older 5000-series Zen 3 units that never reached retail. The 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X3D was demonstrated as having a 3.5 GHz base clock, and it can boost up to 4.1 GHz. The 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X3D had 3.5 GHz base and 4.4 GHz boost clocks.

Team Red currently only sells one AM4 3D V-Cache model, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU. However, recent price cuts have resulted in increased unit sales. AMD could be readying a cheaper alternative, with previous reports proposing that a "Ryzen 5 5600X3D" is positioned to take on Intel's 13th Gen Core i5 series (with DDR4).

The unreleased Ryzen 9 5950X3D and 5900X3D have 3D V-Cache stacks on both of their CCDs, granting 192 MB of L3 cache. This is unique given that all retail 3D V-Cache CPUs released so far restrict this to a single CCD stack. Apparently, AMD decided to stick with the latter setup due to it offering the best balance of performance and efficiency. Gaming benchmarks demonstrated that there was not much of a difference between the configurations.

The Gamers Nexus video description states that the content covers some of AMD Zen's history from a side conversation with Amit Mehra and Bill Alverson at AMD. They discuss the many challenges of initial bring-up, products that get pitched and some that don't make it to market, and how Zen almost didn't make the original showing in 2016. AMD's Ryzen CPUs launched to the public in 2017, but this content looks at the behind-the-scenes of what led up to that launch.