According to Donny Woligroski, senior technical marketing manager at AMD, the company’s future Ryzen 9000 “Granite Ridge” desktop processors, which are based on the “Zen 5” microarchitecture, won’t outperform the Ryzen 7000X3D series at gaming workloads. This was said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware. While they won’t quite match, the latest “Zen 5” CPUs, including the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 9 9950X, will perform almost as well in games as the 7800X3D and 7950X3D. However, the productivity tasks executed on the new CPUs will see considerable generational performance gains, especially in multithreaded workloads utilizing vector extensions like AVX512 and VNNI. In our testing, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D beats out even the Intel Core i9-14900KS to maintain its title as the fastest gaming desktop processor available.

Because of this, we anticipate that the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 9 9950X CPUs will perform more like the Intel Core i9-13900K or i9-14900K when it comes to gaming. There isn’t much to look forward to for gamers with a 7000X3D series chip or even a 14th Gen Core i7 or Core i9 chip. AMD stated that it is actively developing the Ryzen 9000X3D series, or “Zen 5” with 3D V-cache technology, and it seems certain that it will continue to have the fastest gaming CPUs. This doesn’t seem unlikely at all.

In-depth details about the “Lion Cove” P-core were revealed by Intel in its recent “Lunar Lake” architecture reveal. The company stated that the core has a 14% IPC increase over the “Redwood Cove” P-core driving “Meteor Lake,” which in turn has an IPC similar to the “Raptor Cove” P-core driving the current 14th Gen Core processors. Even its Core Ultra “Arrow Lake-S” desktop CPUs will use “Lion Cove” P-cores from Intel. If Intel’s claims of a 14% IPC rise for the “Lion Cove” P-core hold true, a similar performance bump to “Zen 5” might make the 9000X3D series competitive with “Arrow Lake-S,” considering that 3D V-cache delivered “Zen 4” a 20–25% boost in gaming performance. However, AMD noted in the interview that 3D V-cache might not give “Zen 5” the same gaming performance boosts as “Zen 4.”

Though there is a trick up AMD’s sleeve, the company is developing the “Zen 5” 8-core CCD on the 4 nm foundry process, which is anticipated to include the TSV basis for stacked 3D V-cache memory. AMD hasn’t said definitively that “Zen 5” won’t include an extensible dedicated L2 cache. In response to a query from Tom’s Hardware regarding “Zen 5’s” L2 cache expandability, AMD said, “Yes, provided you have access to finer-grain 3D interconnect.” Thus, today’s pitches are at 9-micron through silicon via (TSV) technology. The degree of partitioning can get considerably finer-grained as you descend to, say, 6-, 3-, 2-micron and even lower.” Here, it’s crucial to remember that AMD has not confirmed anything. AMD did not specify the precise pitch that an L2 cache had to have.

If accurate, this suggests that the business may provide a larger 3D V-cache chiplet to the CCD in the 9000X3D series. This would boost the size of each core’s dedicated L2 cache in addition to increasing the on-die L3 cache’s capacity from 32 MB to 96 MB. Each core of the “Zen 5” microarchitecture receives 1 MB of dedicated L2 cache, which might be increased by the new 3D V-cache chiplet.

Compared to the shared L3 cache, the L2 cache uses quicker SRAM physical media and works at a greater data rate. Therefore, the next 3D V-cache chiplet may include two different types of SRAM: eight L2 cache SRAM units to grow each of the eight on-die L2 caches, and a 64 MB L3 SRAM that expands the on-die 32 MB L3 SRAM.

Expected to be a key component of next-generation CPU gaming performance, Intel has increased the size of its L2 cache for “Lion Cove” P-cores with “Lunar Lake” and the next “Arrow Lake.” On “Lunar Lake,” the four P-cores feature a dedicated L2 cache of 2.5 MB per. On “Arrow Lake,” 3 MB of dedicated L2 cache should be provided to the same P-core. Thus, AMD most likely recognizes the value of fattening both the L2 and L3 caches.

There are a lot of rumors circulating that AMD will release the Ryzen 9000X3D series in 2024. Some sources even suggest that they will debut in Q4 of that year, which would coincide with Intel’s release of the Core Ultra “Arrow Lake-S” desktop CPUs.