Friday, June 16th 2023
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X3D & 5900X3D Historical Prototypes Demoed in Gamers Nexus Video
Gamers Nexus has uploaded a video feature dedicated to the history of AMD's Zen CPU architecture—editor-in-chief and founder Stephen Burke ventured to Team Red's Austin, Texas-based test and engineering campus. Longer and more in-depth coverage of his lab tour will be released at a later date, but today's upload included an interesting segment covering unreleased hardware. The Gamers Nexus crew spent some time looking at several examples of current and past generation AMD 3D V-Cache CPUs. Prototype Ryzen 7000-series Zen 4 designs were shown off by principal engineer Amit Mehra and technical team member Bill Alverson. They also brought out older 5000-series Zen 3 units that never reached retail—the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X3D was demonstrated as having a 3.5 GHz base clock, and it can boost up to 4.1 GHz. The 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X3D had 3.5 GHz base and 4.4 GHz boost clocks.
Team Red only sells one AM4 3D V-Cache model at the moment, in the form of its well received Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU. It was released over a year ago, but recent price cuts have resulted in increased unit sales—system builders looking to maximize the potential of their older generation Ryzen 5000-series compatible mainboards are snapping up 5800X3Ds. AMD could be readying a cheaper alternative, with previous reports proposing that a "Ryzen 5 5600X3D" is positioned to take on Intel's 13th Gen Core i5 series (with DDR4). The unreleased Ryzen 9 5950X3D and 5900X3D have 3D V-Cache stacks on both of their CCDs (granting 192 MB of L3 cache), which is unique given that all retail 3D V-Cache CPUs (released so far) restrict this to a single CCD stack. Apparently AMD decided to stick with the latter setup due to it offering the best balance of performance and efficiency, plus gaming benchmarks demonstrated that there was not much of a difference between the configurations.
The Gamers Nexus video description states: "This didn't make the final cut for our upcoming, in-depth lab tour of AMD's testing & engineering campus in Austin, Texas, but the stories told (and the unreleased products shown) were too interesting to cut entirely -- so we branched out the discussion."
It continues: "This (video) covers some of AMD Zen's history from a side conversation with Amit Mehra and Bill Alverson at AMD, discussing the many challenges of initial bring-up, products that get pitched and some that don't make it to market, and how Zen almost didn't make the original showing in 2016. AMD's Ryzen CPUs launched to the public in 2017, but this content looks at the behind-the-scenes of what led up to that launch."
Sources:
Gamers Nexus YouTube Channel, Wccftech
Team Red only sells one AM4 3D V-Cache model at the moment, in the form of its well received Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU. It was released over a year ago, but recent price cuts have resulted in increased unit sales—system builders looking to maximize the potential of their older generation Ryzen 5000-series compatible mainboards are snapping up 5800X3Ds. AMD could be readying a cheaper alternative, with previous reports proposing that a "Ryzen 5 5600X3D" is positioned to take on Intel's 13th Gen Core i5 series (with DDR4). The unreleased Ryzen 9 5950X3D and 5900X3D have 3D V-Cache stacks on both of their CCDs (granting 192 MB of L3 cache), which is unique given that all retail 3D V-Cache CPUs (released so far) restrict this to a single CCD stack. Apparently AMD decided to stick with the latter setup due to it offering the best balance of performance and efficiency, plus gaming benchmarks demonstrated that there was not much of a difference between the configurations.
It continues: "This (video) covers some of AMD Zen's history from a side conversation with Amit Mehra and Bill Alverson at AMD, discussing the many challenges of initial bring-up, products that get pitched and some that don't make it to market, and how Zen almost didn't make the original showing in 2016. AMD's Ryzen CPUs launched to the public in 2017, but this content looks at the behind-the-scenes of what led up to that launch."
39 Comments on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X3D & 5900X3D Historical Prototypes Demoed in Gamers Nexus Video
Only Intel's processors currently offer hardware-based, architecture-aware thread scheduling.Possible, but I'm not entirely sold that the architectural improvements going from Zen 3 X3D to Zen 4 X3D are as extreme as to make up for that loss, especially with the inherently inefficient topology that the hybrid-cache Zen 4 X3D processors have. As stated on the video and as shown with the 7950X3D, residency is king, and the processor is always attempting to keep a workload in the CCD which is local to that core. Would it be 100% scalable? Probably not, but that wouldn't matter. Neither the 3950X, 5950X or 7950X offer 100% scaling. Software would be optimized around that. Either way, it's just AMD trying their very best to prevent self-owning itself. Why sell a dual-X3D 7950X3D for $799 when they can charge $4,000+ for the privilege? After all, as mighty as the i9-13900KS is, it's not a CPU that's oozing triple digit megabytes of cache.
I don't consider them friendly, just budget friendly at best. No company is your friend & no one should ever make the mistake of thinking that way!
System RAM bandwidth per-core is half on the 5950X than on the 5800X. Decreasing the dependence on system RAM nets higher performance boosts on the model with lower RAM bandwidth per-core.
As for the other comments, I doubt there isn’t any market for a 5950X3D. There are plenty people on AM4 who play games and want the productivity of a 16-core CPU.
In my mind GPU is still king in terms of gaming system cost balance and X3D CPU parts are the exception offing boosts in cache sensitive games primarily.
Releasing a single or dual 5950X3D wouldn't have made much sense after the launch of Zen4 with the obvious higher premium AMD would have charged for that.
Having said that a 5950X3D part is appealing to me and if available at the time I might have gotten one since my gaming pc hardware is my backup to my work pc but that's a very specific and niche use case where that kind of purchase sort of makes sense.
And there focus now is going to keep pushing people to AM5 with Zen 5 around the corner.
The gall they had to release the Threadripper pro line and abandon TRX40 is just bullshit IMO.