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.

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.

Back in 2004 my PC RAM was 256. My relative's laptop had 128. That's crazy when a modern CPU cache can theoretically host an OS (or even multiple OSes) from early 2000s.

Oh man. I am running computations on my server that involve computing geodesic distances with the heat method. The job turns out to be a L3 cache thrasher, leaving my cpus underutilized for multi worker jobs .... 208mb instead of my 25 per socket sounds amazing

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.

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.

They should allow it to function without any external RAM.

I am so grateful that I bought my 128 GB ram kit in January of last year for my own 9950 upgrade. We just built my dad a 7000 series to replace his old AM4 (2017 build) and 32 gigs DDR five was nearly the same price at Micro Center that I paid last year. I was able to gift him an Nvidia 1060 discreet graphics card so that he could continue to run his two monitors. The newer motherboards have much less on board capability for that.

I'm interested to know if the L3 cache all behaves as a single pool for any core on either CCD, whether there's a penalty in access time depending on locality or whether they are just entirely localised.

Whenever I see a chip like this, I think "why wont my company let me use a decent computer"

I don't really see a huge reason to buy this other than it being a top-tier halo product.

For gaming, AMD already pins the game threads to the CCD with the extra cache pretty well.

For multi-threaded workloads the gain from having cache on both CCDs is quite small.

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?

so you're telling me I can (theoretically) have a full Alpine Linux installation in just the CPU? I'm impressed

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.

I know the prices of RAM are high, but 256GB RAM limit seems like omission. If they supported at least 512GB in quad or eight channel that would be something worth looking at for me. I know there is Threadripper but ECC memory is out of reach.

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

that is larger than the HDD of my first PC.

My first computer had 64KB of RAM. My first PC had 8MB of RAM.

Factorio mega basing just found a new ceiling.

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

With the best silicon tech, in R&D, what would be the maxium static RAM(L1 cache) you could really slap to a 8 core CPU? (Zero DRAM).

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

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