It's been over a month since AMD launched its Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor which quickly established itself as the fastest gaming CPU in the world. To investigate AMD's design philosophy, semiconductor analyst Tom Wassick (via Hardwareluxx) took apart the chip, and the findings of his first report suggest that a large part of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is just dummy silicon for structural integrity. Still, AMD has extracted a lot of performance from its second-generation 3D V-Cache design, landing a solid victory against Intel's Arrow Lake chips.
Ryzen 9000 X3D processors are structured to slot the L3 SRAM cache chiplet below the heat-generating CCD (the compute die with the eight CPU cores). This allows for higher clock speeds by offering more thermal headroom, though AMD never exactly detailed the ins and outs of its stacking methodology. The report mentions that both the CCD and 3D V-Cache chiplets are thinned down to sub 10µm levels to expose the TSVs for hybrid bonding. Coupled with BEOL (Back-end of Line) - the section with the necessary metal layers for connectivity - the total SRAM and CCD package comes in at 40-45µm thick.
