Thanks to Alder Lake, we will see Zen 3+ Warhol with AMD’s 3D V-Cache Stack chiplet technology

Suddenly, yesterday at Computex 2021, AMD showed their new AMD next-gen 3D V-Cache Stack chiplet technology in partnership with TSMC and showed a prototype on a Ryzen 5900X. Confused about AMD 3D chiplet technology?

AMD describes this to be a packaging breakthrough that combines AMD’s innovative chiplet architecture with 3D stacking using an industry-leading hybrid bond approach that provides over 200 times the interconnect density of 2D chiplets and more than 15 times the density compared to existing 3D packaging solutions.

So, Dr Lisa Su showed off first of a kind Ryzen 9 5900X with a 3D V-Cache with 64 MB of L3 SRAM. We saw a standard Zen 3 CCD sitting next to a 3D packaged CCD that measures 6mmx6mm. 

Interestingly, if you closely see, the size of the Zen 3 based CCD remains the same, but there’s another package on top of the CCD that houses 64 MB of cache, adding on to the 32 MB of L3 cache already featured on the Zen 3 CCD.

So, AMD promises to provide more cache to each CCD, directly benefiting the cores to provide better IPC and gaming performance. So, on a Ryzen 9 5900X prototype, we see 96 MB of L3 cache per CCD or up to 192 MB of total L3 cache on the whole Ryzen 9 5950X CPU.

AMD also used to give some early idea of this Zen 3 based Ryzen 9 5900X prototype with 3D chiplet technology, and it did well. Testing it out on various games like Gears V delivered up to 12% faster performance because of increased game cache size. On average, AMD is now claiming to provide a 15% performance increase with the 3D V-Cache design. 

So, Dr. Ian Cutress from Anandtech confirmed the fact that AMD will be using its 3D V-Cache Stack chiplet technology on its existing Zen 3 products.

Although we had rumours that Zen 3+ Warhol might be cancelled yesterday’s demo and the words from Dr. Ian confirm Zen 3+ is happening, not necessarily a huge uplift or the use of a new process node but new tech.

And why not? If you are getting a claimed 15% performance gains in modern games using the new technology on the same 7 nm Zen 3 architecture, it makes no sense to use a new manufacturing node for Zen 3+. So, the use of 3D V-Cache Stack chiplet technology on refreshed CPUs be the start of AMD’s shining future ahead.