Manufacturing capacity is the bottleneck.
During its CES 2022 presentation, AMD revealed that it planned to release its Ryzen 7 5800X3D to better combat the excellent gaming performance offered by Intel’s strong 12th Generation CPUs, and the 12900K in particular. Prior to the reveal, we expected AMD would release 3D versions of its 5900X and 5950X processors. AMD did previously demonstrate a 5900X prototype, but according to Digitimes, manufacturing limitations are likely behind the reason we’ll only be seeing the 5800X3D for now.
Digitimes sources state that TSMC's 3D SoIC technology isn’t yet in volume production and what little capacity there is is being prioritized for enterprise chips. However, TSMC is building a new advanced packaging plant in Chunan, Taiwan that’s expected to come online later this year, but it not might come fast enough for volume 5800X3D production prior to the introduction of Zen 4 later in the year.
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AMD believes the inclusion of all of that extra L3 cache will add a healthy dollop of gaming performance on top of the base 5800X, which isn’t exactly a slouch anyway. The idea is that latency sensitive applications like games will benefit from not having to access the DRAM as often. AMD says the technology can add 15% more performance, which is enough to put it ahead of the 12900K, but we’ll reserve judgment on that until we’ve tested the 5800X3D ourselves.
3D packaging is still a fairly new frontier in chip design, but it's clear that both AMD and Intel are going all in on the technology. Chips including everything from stacked cache to die on die and all the way to splitting blocks and sliced circuits across different dies are on both company's roadmaps.
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is set to launch in spring 2022, so there’s still a few months to wait. If limited TSMC manufacturing capacity continues until mid 2022 or later, it may be that the 5800X3D will remain a niche CPU. It's set to be superseded by Zen 4 CPUs later in 2022.
