TSMC’s 3D Tech Supply & Manufacturing Woes May Cause Limited AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Availability, Could Also Explain No 3D Variants of 5900X & 5950X

While AMD has its reason for launching the Ryzen 7 5800X3D as the only 3D V-Cache option for mainstream 8 core gamers, it looks like the real reason for having the brand new tech exclusive to just one processor might have to do with TSMC's 3D tech supply and manufacturing capabilities.

Now you must be asking why it is so hard to manufacturer a Ryzen 7 5800X, a 7nm chip with 3D V-Cache? Well manufacturing a 7nm chip isn't hard now as TSMC has years of expertise & their 7nm node has some really high yields. The main issue here is the addition of 3D V-Cache that makes use of TSMC's brand new 3D SoIC technology.

According to DigiTimes (via PCGamer), the TSMC 3D SoIC technology is still in its infancy and has yet reached volume production. And furthermore, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D isn't the only 3D V-Cache CPU out there. You might remember AMD's EPYC Milan-X lineup that was announced a few months back? Well yes, that also relies on 3D V-Cache and not just a singular stack but several stacks. While a single AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D uses just one 64 MB SRAM stack, a Milan-X chip such as the flagship EPYC 7773X makes use of eight 64 MB stacks for a total of 512 MB L3 cache. And considering the big performance benefits of extra cache in enterprise workloads, there's a huge demand for these chips in the respective segment.

As such, AMD decided to prioritize its Milan-X chips over Ryzen 3D chips, and hence, we only got one Vermeer-X chip in the whole stack. AMD did show a prototype Ryzen 9 5900X3D last year but that's out of the equation for now. The prototype shown by AMD featured 3D Stacking on a single stack and that also raises the question of what if AMD had just enabled Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X with just a single 3D stacked CCD, would that have worked, and what the potential latencies and performance for those would've looked like. AMD did show similar performance gains for the 12 core prototype running a single stacked die but I guess volume must be really limited if even those chips didn't make their way to final production.

But there's hope as TSMC is building a brand new advanced packaging facility in Chunan, Taiwan. The new plant is expected to become operational by the end of this year so we can expect better supply and volume production of TSMC's 3D SoIC technology and hopefully see future iterations of Zen 4 with the same packaging technology.

AMD Ryzen 'Zen 3D' Desktop CPU Expected Features:

AMD has promised up to 15% performance improvement in gaming versus their current lineup and having the new CPU compatible on the existing AM4 platform means that users running older chips can upgrade without any hassle of upgrading their whole platform. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D is expected to release in Spring, this year.