The expectation was maximum from the point of view of the player to know and know all the processors that AMD was going to include in its new line of desktop processors. But that presentation yesterday was limited to one model that left everyone cold, where questions were thrown behind the scenes. Why is Lisa Su going to compete with a single Ryzen 7 5800X3D model against the entire Intel Core 12 lineup?
Design, costs and performance 5800X3D
Innovating is not easy, even less if we are talking about vertical stacking. Intel has an advantage in this regard and while it doesn’t have a single product on the desktop with its Foveros technology, AMD and TSMC are oddly ahead and are at the forefront with 3D V-Cache. The one chosen as we saw yesterday is the current Ryzen 7 5800X, which sees its 32MB of L3 expand to nothing less than 96 MB using smaller vertical silicon.
To be precise, we are t alking about the fact that the die Core of the 5800X that it shares with all of the 5 series models measures 82 mm2
Lower frequency and same TDP
Aside from the total L3 cache which drops from the aforementioned 32MB to 96MB for the 64MB vertical stack, the only difference between the versions is that the frequency in this 5800X3D has dropped from 200MHz to 4.5 GHz. So to sum it up, just one 3D V-Cache gaming processor, with more L3s, a lower clock rate than the whole Intel deployment, why?
Here is the interesting thing. There are 3 reasons explained by AMD itself for this brief launch. The first is that we want to verify the impact of V-Cache on sales, since including the vertical L3 implies an additional chip and packaging cost together, so faced with the shortage of existing chips, a CPU with a single CCD is more optimal to have units.
Second, a single chip with V-Cache is easier to optimize than dealing directly with two, as it is a cutting edge technology at TSMC. Finally, AMD talked about power and consumption. It is true that the extra cache adds a few watts to the actual CPU consumption even when the processor is idle.
Therefore, considering the increase in IPC and gaming performance achieved with this improvement, it was considered to reduce the frequency to maintain temperatures and consumption over the entire voltage range and most importantly, allow some overclocking manual o con PBO.
Additionally, this Ryzen 7 5800X3D would be faster than the i9-12900K and only slower than its KS version and for very little, so really AMD would be competing for the crown of gaming performance with a cheaper competitor than Intel, although with less total nuclei. It is according to Lisa Su, a 15% faster than 5900X, its price will therefore be the key factor in positioning it as attractive or not.