Imagine a Ryzen 9 5950X with 192MB of L3 cache. AMD showed an easy way to increase cache for their processors

At Computex 2021, AMD showed off the unusual Ryzen 9 5900X. It differed in that it contained an additional 64MB SRAM that acted as additional L3 cache.

In this case, we were shown, of course, not a microcircuit, but the technology thanks to which such an improved processor could appear. We are talking about a three-dimensional layout, thanks to which the microcircuit was added on top of the processor chiplet, as well as the V-Cache hybrid connection technology, which is responsible for combining and accelerating the total L3 cache, which is obtained by connecting an external microcircuit with the internal processor cache. By the way, the total bandwidth of the L3 cache in this case increases to 2 TB / s, which is even faster than the L1 cache, although the latencies will be higher.

Apparently, serial products will have such a cache only in the case of top models. In particular, for CPUs with 12 and 16 cores, we are talking about 64 MB of such cache memory for each chiplet, that is, a total of 192 MB of L3 cache (including 64 MB of its own memory)!

Does this make sense? According to AMD, at least in games this should provide a good performance boost.

The company says an average of 15% growth, but the range is from 4% to 25%. The tests will show how the applications will behave.

Most importantly, this is not just a technology that will debut sometime in the future. AMD intends to launch the corresponding processors into production at the end of this year. But at the same time, only top-end CPUs will have such additional cache memory, at least because of the need to spend a lot of silicon on semiconductor wafers, which is now in great shortage.

AMD 3D Chiplet Technology: A packaging breakthrough for high-performance computing.

— AMD (@AMD) June 1, 2021

Also, the question is still open as to which line we will see such CPUs. But rumors say Ryzen 6000 processors with Zen 3+ architecture will be released in the fall, and they are quite suitable. In addition, in this case, the updated processors will be quite different from the current ones.