AMD has officially announced the latest entry into its Ryzen 9000 X3D lineup of CPUs, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. The bizarrely named CPU is the world's first CPU with a dual 3D V-Cache design. What this means is that, unlike the previous Ryzen 9000X3D chips, which had 3D V-Cache on only one CCD, the new 9950X3D2 has vertically stacked cache on both core complexes.
Under the hood, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition features a 16-core, 32-thread configuration with a base clock of 4.3 GHz and a boost clock of 5.6 GHz. Notably, the boost clock is 100 MHz lower than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which can be attributed to the additional power required for the second cache stack. Speaking of power, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 CPU has a massive TDP rating of 200W, which is at least 30W higher than any other CPU in AMD's Ryzen 9000 lineup.
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Of course, having a unique dual-cache design has its drawbacks as well, and the power draw certainly seems like a major one. The main selling point of the CPU is its massive 208MB cache pool, distributed across the two CCDs. Both core complexes have 64 MB of 3D V-cache each, in addition to 32 MB on-CCD cache, for a total of 192 MB of L3 cache. Adding L2 cache brings the total to 208MB for this single CPU.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 takes advantage of the second-gen 3D V-cache design, which has immense thermal advantages over the first-gen. Nevertheless, with a 200W TDP and dual-layer cache, expect the Ryzen 9 9950X3D to be a pretty difficult chip to cool. AMD has also baked in a 2-core Radeon GPU for basic display and diagnostic purposes.
AMD did not share any gaming benchmarks in its announcement video, but the productivity numbers it showed were 5-7% better than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Of course, any performance claims will have to be verified first, so be on the lookout for a full TweakTown review of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition when it launches.
AMD has not announced official pricing for the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, but it has confirmed that the CPU will be available to purchase starting April 22. The launch of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 was pretty much leaked by ASRock in a recent press release, but AMD seems to have pushed its launch date by a few days. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how the new Zen 5 CPU compares with the gaming king, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.
