Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor uses TSMC SoIC technology

AMD demonstrated the Ryzen 9 5900X processor with 3D V-Cache during the Taipei Computer Show last year. I thought that many Zen 3 processors would use this technology. However, only one Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor was officially released at CES 2022 this year, and the reason may be related to TSMC’s 3D technology supply and manufacturing capabilities.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D

In fact, the yield rate of TSMC’s 7nm process is quite high. The manufacturing difficulties here are not related to chip manufacturing. It is not difficult to produce a 7nm Ryzen 5000 series processor. The main source of the problem is the insufficient capacity of TSMC’s new 3D SoIC packaging technology.

Ryzen 7 5800X3D

According to DigiTimes, TSMC’s 3D SoIC packaging technology is still in its infancy, and its production capacity is still relatively low. In addition, AMD not only has the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a processor with 3D V-Cache, but also the EPYC Milan-X series processor for the server. An Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor will only use one CCD stacked with 64MB 3D V-Cache, while only one Milan-X can use up to 8, the L3 cache capacity can reach up to 768MB, and the workload of the server can better take advantage of the huge cache, and the market demand for these chips is huge.

Plus the server market can make more profit than the consumer market, AMD will naturally give priority to the production of Milan-X with limited resources, so we only see one Vermeer-X processor put into the consumer market, AMD did show a prototype of the Ryzen 9 5900X3D at Computex last year, but it never went into production.

But with TSMC’s new advanced packaging factory expected to be operational by the end of this year, it can be expected that they will be able to mass-produce more chips in 3D SoIC packages by then, and Zen 4 processors may also use this technology to stack L3 cache.