Computex 2024 was a pretty decent affair—despite AI products festooning every stand—thanks to AMD and Intel launching some new, tasty-looking CPU architectures. PC gamers, though, were hoping to see AMD announced 3D V-cache models alongside its Ryzen 9000 chips but to no avail. However, one rumour currently doing the rounds is that we won't need to wait very long to see them, with 9000 X3D variants appearing as early as September.
The source of said rumour is Club386, who spoke with an unnamed person at Computex, claiming that AMD plans to launch 3D V-cache equipped versions of its new Ryzen 9000 processors in September. When we spoke to AMD at Computex, it didn't say anything about release dates but it did confirm that it was «working actively on really cool differentiators to make it even better.»
Three months would be a bit of a record for AMD and its introduction of X3D variants after a new architecture announcement. For example, the time gap between the Zen 3 and the Ryzen 7 5800X3D announcements was around 18 months, and it was almost six months between the Zen 4 and Ryzen 9 7950X3D launches. So three months is a mere blink of an eye, in comparison.
Not that this would be surprising, if true, as it's not like 3D V-cache is a brand new technology. It's been over two years since AMD first started adding 64MB slices of extra L3 cache to some of its processors, so there's a good chance that the chip giant is just waiting for the usual round of October sales to shift older products before hitting our wallets again with a new batch of X3D CPUs.
As the first models of the Ryzen 9000 series have already been announced, it's not too hard to guess which ones will get a 3D V-cache variant. We'll almost certainly see a 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D, 12-core 9900X3D and an 8-core 9800X3D, but what about a mid-range processor?
After all, AMD did say «cool differentiators» when discussing what improvements it's bringing to the cache technology, so we could see a Ryzen 5 9600X3D
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