AMD RDNA 3 “Navi 31” GPUs Seem To Be Ready For 3D V-Cache Implementation For Future Radeon RX 7000 Cards

AMD's recently launched Navi 31 "RDNA 3" GPUs might be ready to integrate 3D V-Cache for future Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards.

Semiconductor packaging engineer, Tom Wassick, recently dissected his new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card (reference model) and made quite a revelation. We know that the Radeon RX 7900 XT comes with a disabled MCD chiplet (5 out of 6 enabled) due to its 20 GB memory capacity & 320-bit bus interface versus the 24 GB memory capacity & 384-bit bus interface on the flagship product.

What else can you see? A linear array of "spots" that look remarkably like the keep out zones on X3D, and that are on the same 17-18 um pitch. Could they be considering stacked MCD functionality (or maybe they're something else)?

— Tom Wassick (@wassickt) January 27, 2023

But according to Tom, the AMD Navi 31 GPU silicon also shows an array of "sports" that look similar to the keep-out zones one would see on X3D parts such as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and the recent Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 X3D parts. These keep-out zones are reportedly the same 17-18 um pitch and the first possibility of why these are featured on the Radeon RX 7000 GPUs with RDNA 3 GPUs could have to do with the implementation of 3D V-Cache.

Now, this won't be the first time that we have heard about 3D V-Cache being integrated into AMD's Radeon RX 7000 GPUs. There were already reports of AMD featuring 3D V-Cache on its Radeon RX 7000 GPUs a while back by Angstronomics. The news outlet reported that there's also a 3D-Stacked solution in the works for the AMD Radeon RX 7000 RDNA 3 GPUs and that would double the Infinity Cache with 32 MB (16 MB 0-hi + 16 MB 1-hi) capacities for a total of 192 MB of cache.

Now AMD already has large pools of cache on their Radeon RX 7000 RDNA 3 GPUs in the form of Infinity Cache. Doubling it would lead to even better performance in cache-starved games & while playing at higher resolution. The current AMD Ryzen 5000 X3D CPUs have already seen massive performance gains with 3D V-Cache and the same is to be expected with the Ryzen 7000 X3D CPUs. The question remains though that when would AMD introduce its 3D V-Cache parts in the Radeon family?

It looks like AMD is going to focus on the mainstream lineup first and do a mid-cycle refresh of the RDNA 3 lineup with faster clocks, better efficiency, and the aforementioned 3D V-Cache. This will be similar to the *950XT refresh we got with RDNA 2 GPUs but we will surely get a bigger performance increase this generation of a refresh than the previous one.

News Source: Tomshardware