Engineer Tom Wassick discovered evidence of possible 3D V-Cache functionality on the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU. He peered inside the 7900 XT chip using infrared observation tools and discovered the alleged connection points of the 3D V-Cache MCD chip, the same type used in the Ryzen Zen 3 and Zen 4 processor architectures. The discovery comes after numerous unconfirmed rumors that AMD would add 3D V-Cache technology in its graphics processors.
Wassik did not argue that these connection points should be used directly for caching purposes. However, AMD currently has no known solutions or plans to use 3D memory packaging other than for caching purposes. It is natural to think that in this case they will be used with some variant of 3D cache to increase the performance of games or calculations.
So far, 3D V-Cache has been successfully used in AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. This technology is based on a hybrid bonding method that combines an additional 64MB cache block on top of a Ryzen or EPYC compute chip to increase L3 cache capacity. Currently, this 3D stacking method has allowed AMD to double the amount of L3 available for Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 7950X3D desktop processors and triple it for Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 7800X3D and EPYC Milan-X server processors.
The performance benefits of this technology were impressive. A classic example of this is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which showed a 28% increase in gaming performance compared to the Ryzen 9 5900X and 7% more performance than the Core i9-12900KS.
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What else can you see? A line board with “spots” that would seem too strong to get into the area on the X3D, and that is on the 17-18 um pitch itself. Could they be considering stacked MCD functionality (or maybe they’re something else)?
— Tom Wassick (@wassickt) January 27, 2023
AMD’s server counterparts are even more impressive: Milan-X tests from AMD and Microsoft show a performance increase of more than 50% compared to standard Milan components. However, this behavior will only be observed for cache-sensitive workloads.
It’s hard to imagine how 3D V-Cache will work in conjunction with the GPU. In theory, the basic principles of 3D V-Cache should still work to some extent. Having more cache will allow you to process cache-sensitive workloads faster, as the GPU will need to make fewer GDDR6 calls.
AMD’s Infinity Cache technology in the RX 6000 series of graphics cards helped AMD use slower GDDR6 memory without losing performance compared to NVIDIA RTX 3000 graphics cards with energy-intensive GDDR6X memory. However, it is not known to what extent 3D V-Cache will be effective.
Another problem that AMD will have to face is overheating. This problem is specific to AMD Ryzen X3D processors, where the additional cache block prevents heat dissipation, which leads to a simultaneous decrease in the frequency of the processor and an increase in temperature. There is a high possibility that AMD will be forced to reduce the clock speeds of the GPU in order to control the temperature.
The repair service in Germany discovered a massive defect in AMD Radeon RX 6900 and 6800 video cards – the graphics processor was destroyed
Source: Tom’s Hardware
