AMD’s Ryzen 7000X3D chips get release dates: February 28 and April 6, for $699/$599/$449

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

First announced to much fanfare during AMD Keynote at CES 2023 (and introduced much earlier), the Ryzen 7000X3D chips will be the second generation of AMD consumer chips to employ the company’s novel 3D stacked V-Cache technology. V-Cache allows AMD to stack a 64MB L3 cache die on top of their existing CCDs to expand the total L3 capacity of a Zen 3/4 CCD from 32MB to 96MB. And in the case of multi-CCD designs like the Ryzen 9 7950X, bringing the total L3 cache pool of the entire chip to 128MB.

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

Interestingly, AMD has gone for an inhomogeneous design for these multi-CCD parts: instead of providing V-Cache to both CCDs, AMD is only equipping one of the CCDs with the additional L3 cache. The other CCD will remain a simple Zen 4 CCD, with its built-in 32MB of L3 cache. The unbalanced design, in addition to allowing AMD to control the costs of what is still a relatively expensive technology to implement, will allow AMD to offer something close to the best of both worlds for its multi-CCD parts. V-Cache equipped Zen 4 CCDs will offer 6 or 8 CPU cores backed by the massive L3 pool, for tasks that benefit from the larger cache size, while standard Zen 4 CCDs will not have the burden of V-Cache , which will allow them to clock higher for pure performance workloads that would not benefit from the additional cache.

As with the original 5800X3D, AMD is targeting these chips at gamers in particular, as the complex and data-intensive nature of gaming means they often benefit from having extra L3 cache on hand. The 5800X3D was, depending on the game, around 15% faster than its standard Ryzen counterpart, at least as long as it wasn’t limited by the GPU. AMD is being a bit more coy this time about doing apples-to-apples comparisons to its regular Ryzen 7000 chips, so for now the only official performance numbers available from AMD are comparing 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 final chips to see if the additional L3 cache it’s just as beneficial for Zen 4 as it was for Zen 3.

In its CES 2023 keynote, AMD announced specifications for two and a half chips, as well as an undetailed 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 will make it to that February launch date.

(Image courtesy Tom’s Hardware)

As noted above, Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D will launch on February 28.^the. The 16-core 7950X3D will hit the streets priced at $699, while the 12-core 7900X3D will launch at $599. At current retail prices, this represents roughly a $100 to $150 premium over its counterparts. regular chips, and the 7950X sells for around $583and the 7900X sells for around $444. The prices of AMD’s best AM5 chips have come down a bit since their 2022 launch, so the new X3D SKUs are coming in at launch prices similar to their non-V-Cache counterparts. Put another way, while $699 would get you a 16-core 7950X in September, in February you’ll get the same chip with an additional 64MB of L3 cache.

Benchmarks aside, at this point the only detail we don’t have about the 7950X3D and 7900X3D are the clock speeds of the V-Cache-equipped CCDs. AMD’s quoted turbo clock speeds are for the vanilla CCD, so it’s unclear how much clock speeds have been reduced for the V-Cache CCD. But taking a hint from AMD’s only X3D CCD part, the 7800X3D, we see that that part has a maximum clock speed of just 5.0 GHz. So, we would expect something similar for the V-Cache CCDs in Ryzen 9 parts.

Speaking of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, we finally have the full specs for AMD’s most straightforward X3D part. Back in January, AMD hadn’t locked in 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 noted above.

The cheapest of the Z3D parts, priced at $449, the 7800X3D will also be the laggard of the bunch, as the chip won’t launch until April 6.^the. AMD hasn’t explained the gap in release 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 retail prices, the 7800X3D will command a $150 premium over the $299 7700X, making it 50% more expensive, assuming these retail prices hold through April. This is the same price the 5800X3D launched at, so AMD is technically just holding the line here, but it underscores how price cuts on the rest of the Ryzen 7000 lineup have made mainstream chips very competitive in terms of price. price/performance. .

In any case, we’ll have more information on AMD’s first V-Cache-equipped Zen 4 chips later this month. In addition to taking a deeper look at the performance improvements brought about by the larger L3 cache, the other major factor that will boost performance will be the Windows thread scheduler. As this is AMD’s first asymmetrical Ryzen CPU, it will be up to Windows and AMD’s chipset driver to determine which CCD to put the threads on for the 7950X3D/7900X3D. Therefore, 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.