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

AMD today announced the launch date and pricing for its eagerly anticipated Ryzen 7000X3D series of processors. Primarily aimed at gamers, the company’s first L3 V-Cache-equipped Ryzen 7000 processor will launch on February 28.^Th, when the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D sell for $699 and $599, respectively. It will be followed by the Ryzen 7 7800X3D a little over a month later, when it goes on sale on April 6 for $449.^Th.

First announced to great fanfare during AMD’s CES 2023 keynote (and teased before), the Ryzen 7000X3D chips will be the second generation of AMD’s consumer chips to feature the company’s novel 3D Stacked V-Cache. Uses technology. V-Cache allows AMD to stack 64MB of L3 cache die on top of its existing CCDs to increase 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.

Following AMD’s successful trial of the technology in the consumer space with the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which was released in spring 2022 to positive reviews, AMD has released a number of V-Cache-equipped Ryzen chips for this generation. A wide line-up has been developed. This includes not only the 5800X3D’s direct successor, the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but also, for the first time, chips using multiple CCDs. These are the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 7950X3D, which will offer 12 and 16 CPU cores respectively.

Interestingly, AMD has gone for a non-uniform design for these multi-CCD parts – instead of giving both CCDs V-Cache, AMD is equipping only one of the CCDs with an additional L3 cache. The second CCD will remain a simple Zen 4 CCD, with its integrated 32MB L3 cache. The unbalanced design, in addition to allowing AMD to control costs, is still a relatively expensive technology to implement, allowing AMD to offer something closer to the best of both worlds for their multi-CCD parts. will Zen 4 CCDs equipped with V-Cache will offer 6 or 8 CPU cores supported by a large L3 pool, for tasks that benefit from larger cache sizes, while vanilla Zen 4 CCDs with V- will be disclaimed by Cache. Overclock for pure throughput workloads that won’t benefit from additional cache.

As with the original 5800X3D, AMD is targeting these chips specifically at gamers, as the complex, data-heavy nature of video games means they often benefit from having extra L3 cache on hand. The 5800X3D was, game-wise, about 15% faster than its vanilla Ryzen counterpart – at least as long as it wasn’t GPU limited. AMD is being a bit more lenient this time around with an apples-to-apples comparison of their regular Ryzen 7000 chips, so the only official performance figures available from AMD for now pit the chips against the 5800X3D. have been. In turn, a 15% improvement is a reasonable baseline since the cache size hasn’t changed over the previous generation, but we’ll definitely want to take a closer look at the final chips to see if the extra L3 cache makes sense. Is. It’s as beneficial for Zen 4 as it was for Zen 3.

Back at its CES 2023 keynote, AMD announced specifications for the two-and-a-half chips, as well as a non-detailed February launch date. With today’s announcement, AMD is finally filling in the rest of the details, as well as confirming that only part of the product stack is going to make the February launch date.

(Photo courtesy of Tom’s Hardware)

As previously reported, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D will both launch on February 28.^Th. The 16-core 7950X3D will hit the streets with a price tag of $699, while the 12-core 7900X3D will launch for $599. At current street prices, that represents about a $100 to $150 premium over the chips’ regular counterparts, with the 7950X selling for about $583, and the 7900X selling for about $444. Prices for AMD’s top AM5 chips have dropped slightly since their 2022 launch, so the new X3D SKUs are coming in at the same launch prices as their non-V-Cache counterparts. Put another way, where $699 will get you a 16-core 7950X in September, in February it’ll get you the same chip with an extra 64MB of L3 cache.

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

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

The cheapest of the Z3D parts, priced at $449, the 7800X3D will also be the last of the bunch, with the chip not launching until April 6.^Th. AMD hasn’t explained the difference in launch dates, but it’s reasonable to assume that AMD is prioritizing the assembly and shipping of its more expensive Ryzen 9 SKUs. In any case, at current street prices the $299 7800X3D will carry a $150 premium over the 7700X, making it 50% more expensive, assuming these street prices hold through April. This happens to be the same price at which the 5800X3D was launched, so AMD is technically just holding the line here, but it’s indicative of how the price cuts on the rest of the Ryzen 7000 lineup have pushed the standard. has made the chips very competitive on a price/performance basis. .

In any case, we’ll have more on AMD’s first V-Cache-equipped Zen 4 chips later this month. Along with improving performance through a larger L3 cache, the other major factor driving performance is going to be the Windows Thread Scheduler. As this is AMD’s first asymmetric Ryzen CPU, it will depend on Windows and AMD’s chipset driver as to which CCD threads to turn on for the 7950X3D/7900X3D. So for this month’s launch, AMD’s hardware and software offerings need to be in sync to make a good first impression for the company.