AMD teases '3D V-Cache' tech that stacks cores and SRAM, delivers 15% boost to today's Ryzen CPUs AMD has revealed a new 3D die stacking technology it claims delivers the equivalent performance boost to a new generation of processor architecture. The packaging technique was revealed in a keynote address to the virtual Computex exhibition delivered by AMD president and CEO Dr Lisa Su, who said the technology bonds “64MB of …
Spectre & Meltdown never worked properly on AMD chips and there are no exploits circulating in the wild beyond AMD's documentation example of how a new feature could be abused to perform an attack, which comes alongside detection & prevention methods and a method to disable the feature if desired. Any software protections for Spectre also prevent it.
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-analysis-predictive-store-forwarding.pdf
Looking past the marketing spiel - where is Intel on this? The idea of 3d stacking lattices and RAM has been knocking about several years now. Provided the chip yield works out this is amazing. As far as I can tell yield is the only remaining advantage of Intel's older processes.
Mildly annoying it's a CPU socket change in the next model rather than fitting older boards (yay, more e-waste) though to be fair, we all knew the 3000/5000 were going to share a socket with the one after on a new board.
Which socket change? From what I've seen elsewhere, the 3D V-Cache demoed was on a custom 5900X chip, with one chiplet/CCX replaced by one with the 3D V-Cache. So that's Zen 3 on AM4.
AMD also announced that these 3D V-Cache chips will be available before the end of this year, whereas the new Zen 4 architecture (which will need a new socket) isn't coming out till 2H 2022. So it looks like these new 3D V-Cache will be out well before Zen 4 appears.
As far as I know, the AM4 to AM5 socket change is due to the switch to DDR5 in Zen 4, so if 3D V-Cache chips come out before Zen 4 does, then that means Zen 3, which still needs AM4 for DDR4.
At the moment, this is looking like an unexpected and likely final upgrade path for AM4 users, before the move to Zen 4 and AM5 mid 2022.
I'm thinking along the same lines.
I've got a 3800X at the moment, so Zen 2 and 8/12 core/thread.
The Zen 3 parts are a little faster, but not a massive jump at least not for my use case, which is mostly gaming on that PC (I work on client provided laptops). GPU tends to be the bottleneck for most games.
My plan is to leave it for a while, at least till Zen 4 has been out a bit, then basically buy whatever the then fastest AM4 part is, assuming my BIOS support it of course.
Should keep me going for a while without needing a full rebuild, and AM5 is going to need at least DDR5 memory, as well as a new motherboard and CPU, and you can bet none of those will be cheap even a year from now!
Intel's new CEO have announced that their new share buy-back scheme will be implemented under a new Rule 483 Part B clause which reduces tax-withholding in off-shore accounts by 15 bpp !
This was made possible by replacing all their semiconductor engineers with world class MBAs
AMD have already been using multiple "chiplets" in the package rather than a single die - I think two of the chiplets are "compute complexes" and the 3-d stacking is placing SRAM on top of these. By having chiplets they can mix'n'match chiplets that have yielded different numbers of working processor cores for the different products ... also it means that I think that there's a "lucky dip" in some lower end ranges as to whether your chip has all its processor on the same chiplet or spread across both as this has a minor effect on performance.
Other people have mentioned it's chiplets, AMD have been doing this for a couple of generations now.
The example pictured, is a de-lidded and modified Ryzen 5900X.
The large silicon at the bottom is the IO die (manages things like RAM, PCIe etc).
The smaller ones at the top are the CPU dies, in Zen 3, as used here, these can have up to 8 cores each.
The lower end parts, like the 5600 have a single CPU chiplet, a single 6 core part for the 5600(X) , with the 5800(X) having a single 8 core chiplet.
In the 5900X and 5950X have 2 chiplets, 6 cores or 8 cores each, so 12 or 16 cores total respectively.
The top left chip in the pic is the modified Zen 3 core, with the cache added.
Still no discussion regarding possible heat-induced RAM errors from the stack, especially since they are pushing this towards gaming whose users are more apt to push the limits - overclock - versus other users. If there is no immediate heat issues, what will the constant heat cycles due to SRAM over many years of ownership? What happens to single-bit circuit failures?
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