In the latest development, Advanced Micro Devices has reportedly moved to trademark 3D V-Cache which is the consumer-facing name for the company’s stackable cache solution, with the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office.
This technology which was jointly developed in partnership with TSMC by AMD has so far only been announced in a CPU deployment, and to be more specific it was announced for the upcoming refresh of top tier offerings in AMD’s Zen 3 lineup.
It was also targeted for the 768 MB-toting Epyc Milan-X CPUs, AMD’s trademark now suggests that the technology may be adapted to other AMD products like GPUs, which will be amazing for the company to give direct competition to NVIDIA.
The addition of 3D V-cache leads to a tripling of available L3 cache for the upcoming CPUs and each of the 3D V-Cache chips will be atop a CCX offers an additional 64 MB of cache over the already-present 32 MB per CCX in Zen 3.
Currently, AMD’s rDNA 2 GPUs have only up to 128MB of Infinity Cache, which has proved to be quite beneficial for GPUs that only have a 256-bit memory interface. And if they get double or triple the cache which they already possess, then NVIDIA could be looking at a long-term nightmare.
But, it’s good to remember that patents and trademarks are usually designed to be as general as possible and there have been many cases where companies have often attempted to cover all their bases for the initial application, to better insulate themselves from patent trolls and other IP violations.
However, it’s also true that AMD’s application does seem to heavily favor GPU iterations of the technology and there have been already 23 instances of “GPU” in the application, whereas “CPU” is only mentioned 12 times.
The trademark offered by AMD covers an entire range of technological applications besides CPUs and GPUs and those include SoCs, solid-state drives, DRAM, DRAM controllers, and memory cards to name just some of the possibilities.
According to reports, AMD is also expecting its first iteration of 3D V-Cache to offer performance improvements of up to 15% for certain gaming workloads and the company specifically is aiming to target several esports games, which are more sensitive to cache sizes and can run at higher fps.
