AMD stunned everyone during its Computex 2021 Keynote by announcing plans of a 3D stacked consumer processor, slated to launch towards the next of the year (or early next). The chipmaker also demoed the impact of the stacked V-Cache on gaming performance, with the Ryzen 5000 processors showing a notable gain of 12-15% in most games.
When AMD confirmed to media outlets that we’ll be seeing Zen 3-based designs with stacked V-Cache, many assumed that this would be the Ryzen 5000 XT lineup (codenamed Warhol) based on the Zen 3+ core and TSMC’s N6 (6nm) node. However, as per @Broly_XT on Twitter, Zen 3+ (Ryzen 5000 XT) and 3D V-Cache based Zen processors are two separate lineups.
This likely means that while the Zen 3+/Ryzen 5000 XT lineup will encompass the entire low-end to high-end CPU segments, V-Cache based designs will be limited to high-end Ryzen 9 SKUs such as the one we saw at the Computex Keynote. This makes sense as bringing 96MB of L3 cache to a hex or quad-core SKU won’t make much sense. The twelve and sixteen-core Ryzen 9 designs should get enough of a performance boost to warrant separate SKUs with stacked V-Cache.
