Tuesday, August 13th 2024
AMD Readies Ryzen 5 5500X3D Socket AM4 Processor with 3D V-Cache
If you're on the Socket AM4 platform, AMD is never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you; never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye, never gonna tell a lie, and hurt you. The company is reportedly giving finishing touches to a firecracker of a sub-$200 chip for price-conscious gamers, the Ryzen 5 5500X3D. That's right, AMD is bringing 3D V-cache technology to the mid-range, with a new 6-core processor based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, but enjoying the gaming performance boost from 96 MB of L3 cache on tap.
AMD already has a 6-core X3D Socket AM4 chip, the Ryzen 5 5600X3D, which joined the product stack a couple of years after AMD's original Ryzen 7 5800X3D took the gaming PC processor scene by storm, matching the then swanky new Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake" despite being based on an older-generation "Zen 3" architecture. Not much else is known about the 5500X3D, except that it could have a lower clock speed than the 5600X3D. Back in November 2023, when news of the 5700X3D first hit the scene, the 5500X3D was rumored to be a 6-core/12-thread chip with 3.00 GHz base frequency and 4.00 GHz maximum boost, compared to the 3.30 GHz base and 4.40 GHz boost frequency of the 5600X3D. Given that AMD launched the 5600X3D at $230, AMD could target a sub-$200 price point to wow gamers on AM4, such as $199.
Why is AMD continuing to launch Socket AM4 chips well into the mid-2020s? We're no strangers to love, you know the rules and so do I—the new Socket AM5 lacks backwards-compatibility with DDR4, and as such AMD would be abandoning a large value-conscious desktop market to Intel, which supports DDR4 on even its 14th Gen Core processors. While AMD can't backport Zen 4 to AM4, it can do the next best thing—expand Zen 3 with 3D V-cache to more market segments, and bring Zen 4 kind of gaming performance to those segments. This could probably also have something to do with AMD's wafer-supply agreement with GlobalFoundries, which provides the 12 nm client I/O die for these "new" chips.
Sources:
Harukaze5719 (Twitter), chi11eddog (Twitter)
AMD already has a 6-core X3D Socket AM4 chip, the Ryzen 5 5600X3D, which joined the product stack a couple of years after AMD's original Ryzen 7 5800X3D took the gaming PC processor scene by storm, matching the then swanky new Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake" despite being based on an older-generation "Zen 3" architecture. Not much else is known about the 5500X3D, except that it could have a lower clock speed than the 5600X3D. Back in November 2023, when news of the 5700X3D first hit the scene, the 5500X3D was rumored to be a 6-core/12-thread chip with 3.00 GHz base frequency and 4.00 GHz maximum boost, compared to the 3.30 GHz base and 4.40 GHz boost frequency of the 5600X3D. Given that AMD launched the 5600X3D at $230, AMD could target a sub-$200 price point to wow gamers on AM4, such as $199.
114 Comments on AMD Readies Ryzen 5 5500X3D Socket AM4 Processor with 3D V-Cache
Did you have a question for me, or you just wanted to tell me lol
AMD would need a rethink/redesign of the IMC on the I/O die and how chips can access caches across each others die or a marked increase in vcache per die to make it worthwhile going across the Infinity Fabric even with the extra latency.
If the 5700X3D is going to be faster than the 5500X3D I'd expect this thing to only go to 3.9-4GHZ
5600X is 200 AUD here, so I'd expect it to sell for 300, more than the 5700X for 240
I don't like how slow they run though; pretty sure they're getting close to Zen/Zen+ speeds and purely rely on the V-Cache and IPC improvements despite how much they have improved.
At least it's better than the price increase XT models, I won't be surprised if the 5500X3D is faster than the 5800XT.
The 9xxx series is going to be a sales dud (unless there is a refresh in there that takes the lid off the performance) and they're more expensive across the board (to produce and sell).
Probably doesn't cost AMD much to keep churning out Zen 3 / AM4 processors, and they should be both cheap and have decent margins thanks to having paid for their R&D many times over at this point.
The 5700X3D is a 5800X3D that runs at 4100 MHz instead of 4500 MHz for 2/3 the price or less. It is in no way less "X3D" than the 5600X3D, 5800X3D, 7800X3D, 7900X3D, and 7950X3D.
gamers will get their chips in a couple of months and see the extra cache uplift.
people who need a workstation got their upgrade now and the upgrade is good considering the power savings
The 9950X might shine the most.
‘quite a few are actually worse than the predecessor.
something tells me software will need to be optimised for the longer pipeline and the wider execution engine
Now is it possible AMD decided not to push the chip to the limit so PBO overclocking continues to look like a useful feature.
Looking at this from another perspective let's say you're coming from Zen3 and prices have had a chance to settle a bit where 9700x pretty much settles down in price where 7700x was then it doesn't look so bad. Clearly though if you are a power point user or rely on virtualization you aren't getting much of an improvement.
Now apply this theoretically to 9950x (which we don't have the numbers for yet). For example I use virtualization every day for work using VMWare. Going from 5950x to 9950x (assuming trends like in the above graph still hold) it seems like I might get next to zero meaningful benefit from upgrading so then why bother? Why bother upgrading to the older 7950x/7950x3d either for minimal gains in this scenario? (disclaimer: to be fair the TPU testing is against Virtual Box not VMWare so the benchmark doesn't exactly reflect the use case)
I wouldn't say this is a fiasco but it's a potential chance for some disappointment in some corner case scenarios.
Don't need high clocks.
Don't need high cores.
Don't need serious multithread.
Do need assloads of L2, L3 and quite possibly 3D cache.
Do need low power ingestion, cool and quiet thermals.
Overclocking is a non-thought in such a case and good.
Sub-$150 would be the right buying price and Sub-$50 the right swap price if this is what I think it is.
“Richard Paul Astley (born 6 February 1966) is an English singer. He gained fame through his association with the production trio Stock Aitken Waterman, releasing the 1987 album Whenever You Need Somebody, which sold 15 million copies worldwide. His debut single "Never Gonna Give You Up" was a No. 1 hit in 25 countries, winning the 1988 Brit Award for Best British Single.[1][2] “
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Astley
btw the opening paragraph… Nice!
(if this has been mentioned before, i have not read all the comments)