AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k...

Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

Can someone like... boot Windows 98 on these on a system with no ram?!

The extra cache doesn't do a damn thing (maybe +2%)

The lower leakage currents at lower voltages allowed them to implement a far more aggressive clock curve from the factory. That's where the higher allcore clock comes from (+30W TDP)

I'm not complaining at all, I think this is an excellent way to leverage binning to sell leftover cache.

Though if I may complain, Ars used to actually write about such things in their articles instead of speculate in a way that suspiciously resembles what an AI would write.

Crazy to think that my first personal computer's entire storage (was 160MB IIRC?) could fit into the L3 of a single consumer CPU!

It's probably not possible architecturally, but it would be amusing to see an entire early 90's OS running entirely in the CPU's cache.

9950X3D2? AMD, who is making you name your products like this? At some point just give up and name the chip a UUID already.

Can someone explain if the 3D Vcache are stacked on top of each other or side by side.

If they are stacked then why not 9800X3D2?

Breakdown of the (semi-clickbait) 208MB cache: 16MB L2 (8MB per die?) + 32MB L3 * 2 dies + 64MB L3 Stacked 3D V-cache * 2

For comparison, 9950X3D have a total cache of 144MB.

Given that the dies still have L3 on them does this count as L4 or does the hardware treat it as a single pool of L3?

Would be neat to have an additional cache layer of ~1 GB of HBM on the package but I guess there's no way that happens in the consumer space any time soon.

that is larger than the HDD of my first PC.

It's disappointing that they had this for years but didn't release it until now.

I have a gigabyte of cache on my 9684x at home!

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