Last week, near the end of their presentation at Computex 2021, AMD showed off the 3D-V cache technology that will be present in the Ryzen 6000 (Zen 3+) and will allow it to add additional performance over Intel Alder Lake-S.
The company showed a prototype Ryzen 9 5900X that achieved a total of 96 MB of L3 SRAM memory (versus 64 MB) using this technology, while a Ryzen 9 5950X was able to achieve 192 MB of L3 cache.
AMD claims that this hybrid link approach enables over 200x higher interconnect density with 3x higher overall efficiency (2TB/s bandwidth between chip and cache).
As for performance testing, AMD demonstrated this Ryzen 9 5900X prototype in the Gears 5 game, where it showed up to a 12% performance increase thanks to the increased cache size. However, the red team claimed a 15% performance increase with the 3D-V cache design. So by using this technology in addition to the improvements Zen 3+ offers, it gets more complicated for Intel when it comes to promoting its CPUs as the most powerful for gamers.
In a video posted on YouTube, the company now offered more details, such as a redesign of the silicon that flipped each CCX so that the cores are aligned at the bottom of the chip, while the 3D-V cache memory was placed directly above it to reduce the distance between the L3 cache and the CCX.
With this change, the distance is 1,000 times smaller, which helps reduce power consumption, temperatures, and latency, further improving system performance.