According to a Tweet by semiconductor engineering professional Tom Wassick, it appears that Ryzen 7000 processors seemingly received some upgrades in preparation for upcoming SKUs with 3D V-Cache. Wassick has reportedly discovered more TSV columns in the Zen 4 CCD, suggesting this upgrade could allow for greater V-Cache bandwidth potential than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, one of the best CPUs for gaming.
To be more specific, Wassick says there are two much larger and denser arrays on the Ryzen 7000 chip and some pitch reduction - along with the additional TSV columns. It means Ryzen 7000 3D V-Cache slabs will have more contact area with the CPU, leading to greater L3 cache bandwidth and possible extra power.
3D V-Cache is AMD's stacked L3 caching technology that allows the chipmaker to triple the amount of L3 cache available to the chip by stacking an additional 64MB of SRAM cache on top of a Ryzen's CCD—significantly boosting L3 cache-sensitive workloads such as gaming.
The only consumer-based chip that AMD has released with 3D V-Cache technology is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which features 96MB of L3 cache in total. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D exploded to the top of our gaming charts, where it could match or outpace the competition, such as Intel's 12th Generation Alder Lake CPUs.
For Ryzen 7000, the additional TSV contacts suggest AMD's second-generation implementation of the stacked cache will have higher bandwidth potential over the Ryzen 7 5800X3D's already impressive 2 TBps bandwidth. However, due to the relatively small size of the L3 cache, compared to DDR4/DDR5 memory, having more bandwidth is always lovely to have, so the CPU can swap resources in and out of the L3 cache at a faster rate, which can improve performance.
We suspect the additional contact points will also give the 3D V-Cache other power input if necessary. Extra power could also provide the V-Cache a more considerable performance boost, but that will depend on the design choices AMD will use for AMD's Ryzen 7000 parts; there's a chance the 3D V-Cache could be more efficient and require less power instead of more power.
Overall, these additional TSVs don't say much about how AMD's next-generation 3D V-Cache will operate or how much better it will be over the 5800X3D. But there's a good chance it means Ryzen 7000X3D will, at the very least, have more bandwidth over the Ryzen 7 5800X3D based on this information.
