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AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 7 5800X3D may end up being a limited edition
During its CES 2022 presentation, AMD revealed plans to release its Ryzen 7 5800X3D to better counter Intel’s powerful 12th Gen CPUs, especially the stellar gaming performance offered by the 12900K. Ahead of disclosure, we expect AMD to release 3D versions of its 5900X and 5950X processors. AMD did show a 5900X prototype before, but according to digital age, manufacturing constraints may be the reason we’re only seeing the 5800X3D right now.
Digitimes sources said that TSMC’s 3D SoIC technology is not yet in mass production, and that enterprise chips are prioritizing very little capacity. However, TSMC is building a new advanced packaging plant in Chun’an, Taiwan, which is expected to start production later this year, but it may not be fast enough for mass production of the 5800X3D before the Zen 4 launch later this year.
AMD believes that including all the extra L3 cache will add a healthy gaming performance over the base 5800X, which isn’t a slouch anyway. The idea is that latency-sensitive applications like gaming would benefit from not having to access DRAM as often. AMD says the technology can boost performance by 15%, which is enough to put it ahead of the 12900K, but we’ll reserve judgment on this until we test the 5800X3D ourselves.
3D packaging is still a fairly new frontier in chip design, but it’s clear that both AMD and Intel are going all-in on the technology. Chips that include everything from stacking caches to chip-on-chip, all the way to slicing blocks and slicing circuits on different chips are on both companies’ roadmaps.
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is slated to launch in spring 2022, so there’s still a few months to wait. If TSMC’s limited manufacturing capacity continues into mid-2022 or later, the 5800X3D will likely remain a niche CPU. It will be replaced by Zen 4 CPUs later in 2022.