The company introduced its 3D Encapsulation solution. First, they can cache their processors.
In this year’s Computex, AMD explained what they meant last spring X 3d Under the notation. Of course, it was no big secret to think of a 3D encapsulation solution, ie it would be a 3D chiplet, but it is already doubtful how it would be deployed.
The company has now introduced a technology called 3D V-Cash, which is essentially a cache. This separate chip was introduced by the company on an existing processor called the Ryzen 9 5900X. As is known, this product uses two CPU chipsets in the enclosure, each offering 32 MB of L3 cache. While this sounds like a lot, and it works well in most applications, there are situations where significantly more performance can be achieved with more cache. Yes, but it costs extra chip space, and it’s not really worth it anymore.
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AMD TSV (Through-Silicon VIA – Vertical Interconnect Access) will overcome the above problem by placing an additional 64 MB chip on the said CPU chiplet with encapsulation. This will increase the total capacity of the shared cache to 96 MB per chiplet. The head of the company also showed me what it looks like physically. The image below shows a prototype where a chipset has a 3D V-cache, meaning that a sufficiently 36 mm² cache chip is placed on the 80.7 mm² Zen3 chiplet. Of course, for optimum cooling, the height difference will be offset.
The company also compared the prototype to already available processors. In testing, the Ryzen 9 5900X provided the basis, in the same company, in anonymous VGA, to operate the clock at a fixed 4 GHz. However, while the model is now available on one machine, the other has already used 3D V-cache technology. In this form, the difference was that the latter worked with a shared cache of 192 MB instead of 64.
The additional 128 MB cache is really useful if the workflow is memory intensive, meaning it will work really well in games or coding tasks. The latter also explicitly includes decoding the compressed data used by the game, including subsequent system memory work on the DirectStorage API, which will always be done by the CPU.
According to AMD measurements, 128MB of more cache has a gain of between 4-25% in various games, especially in more modern, more memory-intensive titles.
The company says that the development of their 3D chiplet technology is progressing well and they will start production by the end of the year, but in the first round, this development will only be seen in more expensive, high-performance processors.
