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.

AMD has dropped the price on most of its Ryzen 5000-series CPUs on its official web store and some models have been discounted by as much as US$250 over the MSRP. However, the most interesting discount here might be the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which has been discounted from US$449 to US$329, which makes it a pretty good deal for anyone considering getting what is one of the best CPUs out there for gaming.

Unfortunately, AMD's discounted deal appears to have been very popular and as such the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is currently sold out. It's unclear if AMD will add more stock at the same price point, but what is clear is that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a popular CPU, especially at what now appears to be the right price point. As mentioned, AMD has discounted its entire lineup of Ryzen 5000-series CPUs, so if you've been on the fence whether to upgrade or not, now might be a good time to do so. That said, most online retailers appear to be offering the same CPUs at the same, or at least almost the same price, making the Ryzen 7 5800X3D the only real bargain to be had, if it comes back in stock. Unfortunately, AMD hasn't discounted its CPUs in other regions, so if you're outside of the US, you're not going to see any special deals if you visit the AMD web store.

AMD today announced the Ryzen 5000C line of mobile processors for Chromebooks. This is the company's second generation of Chromebook-specific processors after the Ryzen 3000C series based on the original "Zen" microarchitecture. The 5000C series chips are based on "Zen 3," with CPU core counts of up to 8-core, and hence present a big leap in performance over the 3000C series, along with a complete suite of the latest connectivity, display technology, and security and management features specific to Chrome OS.

The Ryzen 5000C series is based on the 7 nm "Cezanne" monolithic silicon. The chip physically features an 8-core/16-thread CPU based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, with 16 MB of shared L3 cache; an iGPU based on the Vega graphics architecture, with 8 compute units (512 stream processors), a dual-channel DDR4 or LPDDR4/x memory interface, and unlike the conventional Ryzen 5000-series mobile processors, these chips come with a special microcode to match the security and management features of Chrome OS. AMD also supplies Chromebook vendors with timely driver updates for the various components on these chips.

One of the most debated questions surrounding AMD's AM4 platform has been the lack of support for AMD's Ryzen 5000-series CPUs on the company's 300-series chipsets. Now, in an interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD's Corporate VP and GM of the Client Channel business, David McAfee, has thrown some cautious words into the hellish debate on platform fragmentation (some even say artificial segmentation). "It's definitely something we're working through," David said. "And it's not lost on us at all that this would be a good thing to do for the community, and we're trying to figure out how to make it happen." It's not a promise, but it seems that AMD is indeed contemplating solutions that would enable first-generation AM4 chipsets to support AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series CPUs.

The problem has mostly to do with storage space: there are only so much available bits to be used in AM4 motherboards' 16 MB SPI ROM, the read-only memory bank that stores BIOS configurations and the necessary instructions for processor support. As AM4 is one of the longest-lived consumer platforms ever, the number of CPUs has ballooned, which has led to difficult decisions as to which CPUs to support. However, some more creative board partners have resorted to interesting techniques that allowed them to free up space in the SPI ROM that could be used to add support for otherwise incompatible CPUs, such as simplifying the BIOS GUI and falling back on more traditional text-based UIs. That and other practices resulted in a number of vendors adding support for AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips on the most entry-level A320 motherboards, which left consumers that had opted for the more technically accomplished X370 motherboards high and dry - barring a few lucky, ASRock-toting exceptions.