Navi 31: Possible connection for 3D V-Cache on Radeons discovered

AMD is said to have already taken hardware precautions for further expansions of Navi 31, which should provide a quick and easy upgrade path for more powerful SKUs. At least that’s the conclusion reached by semiconductor engineer Tom Wassick.

He wants, as he announced on Twitter (via tomshardware.com), Structures in the memory cache of the Radeon RX 7900 XT have discovered, which could be an array of through-silicon vias (TSVs), as also found in the Zen 3 and Zen 4. In plain language this means that it could be a suitable hardware design for the implementation of 3D V-Cache, which in turn would be placed on the L3 cache die. Accordingly, the Infinity Cache could be expanded without much effort and thus increase performance.

Currently, the GPU with its six Memory Cache Dies (MCDs), which serve the Graphics Compute Dies (GCDs), has a total of 96 MiByte Infinity Cache. 16 MiByte of corresponding cache are available per memory cache.

AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology has so far only found its way into the CPU segment. Corresponding products with the “3D” addition are offered both in the mainstream product range with suitable Ryzen processors and in the enterprise area within the Epyc series.

There, the additional cache memory already provided a significant increase in performance with the first product with 3D V-Cache, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, with which the own Ryzen 9 5900X as well as Intel’s Core i9-12900KS could be outperformed in terms of gaming. How much 3D V-Cache affects GPU performance remains to be seen.