February 28 and April 6, $699/$599/$449

AMD today announced the release date and pricing of its highly anticipated Ryzen 7000X3D series processors. Aimed primarily at gamers, the company’s first L3 V-Cache-equipped Ryzen 7000 processors will be available on February 28.^c, when the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D go on sale for $699 and $599, respectively. It will be followed a little over a month later by the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which will be available on April 6 for $449.^c.

It was first announced with great fanfare AMD’s CES 2023 keynote The Ryzen 7000X3D chips will be the second generation of consumer chips to use AMD’s 3D stacked V-Cache technology. V-Cache allows AMD to stack 64MB of L3 cache on top of existing CCDs to expand the Zen 3/4 CCD’s total L3 capacity from 32MB to 96MB. And in the case of multi-CCD designs like the Ryzen 9 7950X, that brings the total, chip-wide L3 cache pool to 128MB.

After a successful test of the technology in the consumer space with AMD’s original Ryzen 7 5800X3D to positive acclaim in the spring of 2022, AMD has developed a broader set of V-Cache equipped Ryzen chips for this generation. This includes not only the 5800X3D’s direct successor, the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but also chips that use multiple CCDs for the first time. These are the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 7950X3D, which will offer 12 and 16 CPU cores respectively.

Interestingly, AMD has gone to a non-homogeneous design for these multi-CCD parts – instead of giving both CCDs V-Cache, AMD equips only one of the CCDs with an additional L3 cache. The other CCD will remain a simple Zen 4 CCD with an integrated 32MB L3 cache memory. The unbalanced design will allow AMD to offer something close to the best of both worlds for multi-CCD parts, while allowing AMD to control the costs of the technology, which is still relatively expensive to implement. Zen 4 CCDs equipped with V-Cache will offer 6 or 8 CPU cores supported by a massive L3 pool for tasks that benefit from a larger cache size, while vanilla Zen 4 CCDs will not be loaded by V-Cache and will allow them to. higher clock for pure throughput workloads that don’t benefit from additional cache.

As with the original 5800X3D, AMD is targeting these chips specifically at gamers, as the complex, database-heavy nature of video games means they often benefit from having the extra L3 cache on hand. The 5800X3D was about 15% faster than its vanilla Ryzen counterpart, depending on the game – at least as long as it wasn’t GPU limited. AMD is a little more daring this time around with an apples-to-apples comparison with regular Ryzen 7000 chips, so the only official performance benchmarks available from AMD compare the chips to the 5800X3D. Instead, a 15% improvement is a reasonable baseline given that cache sizes haven’t changed in the last generation, but we’ll definitely want to take a closer look at the latest chips to see if there’s any additional L3 cache. It’s as useful for Zen 4 as it is for Zen 3.

At the CES 2023 opening ceremony, AMD announced the specifications for the two half-chips, as well as a detailed February launch date. With today’s announcement, AMD is finally filling in the remaining details, as well as confirming that only a portion of the product stack will make the February release date.

(Image Courtesy Tom’s device)

As mentioned earlier, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D will be available on February 28.^c. The 16-core 7950X3D will hit the streets with a price tag of $699, while the 12-core 7900X3D will be available for $599. At current street prices, that’s about a $100-$150 premium over the chips’ conventional counterparts, with the 7950X selling for approx. 583 dollarsand sells for around 7900X 444 dollars. Prices for AMD’s top AM5 chips have dropped slightly since their 2022 launch, so the new X3D SKUs come with similar selling prices to their non-V-Cache counterparts. In other words, $699 would get you a 16-core 7950X in September, and in February you’d get the same chip with an extra 64MB of L3 cache.

Aside from pricing, the only details we don’t have on the 7950X3D and 7900X3D at this point are the clock speeds for the V-Cache-equipped CCDs. AMD’s quoted turbo clock speeds are for a vanilla CCD, so it’s unclear how much the clock speeds are lowered for the V-Cache CCD. But taking a cue from AMD’s only CCD X3D part, the 7800X3D, we see that part has a top clock speed of just 5.0 GHz. So we would expect something similar for the V-Cache CCDs in the Ryzen 9 parts.

Speaking of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, we finally have full specs on AMD’s most basic X3D part. Back in January, AMD didn’t lock down the base clock speeds for this part, but today we finally have the answer: 4.2GHz. The chip, in turn, will be able to turbo as high as 5.0 GHz, as mentioned earlier.

The cheapest of the Z3D parts, the $449 7800X3D chip, won’t be available until April 6.^c. AMD didn’t explain the gap in release dates, but it’s reasonable to assume that AMD prioritized assembling and shipping the more expensive Ryzen 9 SKUs. Either way, at current street prices, the 7800X3D will carry a $150 premium. 299 dollars The 7700X makes it a full 50% more expensive, given that these street prices will last until April. That’s the same price as the 5800X3D, so AMD is technically holding the line here, but it highlights how the price cuts across the rest of the Ryzen 7000 line make the standard chips competitive on a price/performance basis. .

Anyway, we’ll have more information about AMD’s first V-Cache equipped Zen 4 chips later this month. In addition to taking a deep look at the performance improvements brought about by a larger L3 cache, another key driver of performance will be the Windows thread scheduler. As this is AMD’s first asymmetric Ryzen CPU, which CCD placement for the 7950X3D/7900X3D will depend on Windows and AMD’s chipset driver. So this month’s launch will require AMD’s hardware and software offerings to be in sync for the company to make a good first impression.