AMD's Ryzen 3D V-Cache Chips Have Been in Development For Years The cost of putting more transistors on a single chip is going through the roof, while its already cheap enough to put 50 billion or more on a single chip, which is enough for ray tracing, VR applications, or running a small business. The entire industry has been working on chip stacking, with both Intel and AMD working on stacking memory on top of the processors. Memory is always cheaper, so stacking memory is always cheaper and easier, with it possible to now buy over a hundred flash drive chips stacked on top of each other, but both Intel and AMD have been working on how to do it cheaply and easily, and both are about to show their cards. Two cores are good for just about anything, four are good for doing more things at once, six are great for gaming, with eight being great for crunching larger numbers, and 12 is what everyone thinks is "just right" for whatever you want to do. Four energy efficient processors and eight performance cores, add up to all the performance you could want, but feeding them all memory becomes a problem, and the cheapest way to solve the bottleneck is to stack memory right on top of each core. The difference in speed should be nothing less than astounding, because our circuit boards and different chips are now the only bottleneck left.
AMD Confirms Zen 3 Ryzen CPUs With 3D V-Cache Stack Chiplet Design, Coming Early Next Year Before Zen 4 This article doesn't have much to add, but it does add that AMD is working on a different monolithic chip for a new desktop chip. Basically, if you make one enormous chip with everything but the kitchen sink on it, distributing power and data around becomes a serious bottleneck. The question isn't whether there are ways around the bottleneck, but what's the cheapest no-brainer way to eliminate them entirely. Stacking memory right on top of a chip, eliminates memory as a bottleneck, but shuffle all the data around from one end of the chip to another is something AMD does well and, between the two chip designs we'll have a better idea of where the technology is going in the near future. To keep it in perspective, the chips inside a $10.oo Timex watch today are enough to send a man to the moon, and all these chips will eventually become dirt cheap and integrated into every monitor and TV.
