The AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D is a 55+ watt laptop processor with 16 Zen 4 CPU cores, 32 threads and support for speeds up to 5.4 GHz. It’s also the first mobile chip to feature AMD’s 3D V-cache technology, which stacks cache in a way that lets AMD fit more L3 cache on a single chip.
In this case, that means the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D has 128MB of L3 cache, which is double the amount available in the Ryzen 9 7945HX. When you add 16MB of L2 cache, the new chip has 144 MB of total on-chip memory.
What does that mean in terms of real-world performance? AMD says the new chip is the “world’s fastest mobile gaming processor,” with up to 15% better frame rates than the standard Ryzen 9 7945HX when it comes to 1080p gaming.
According to AMD, the performance gains are even more noticeable at lower power ranges, with up to an 11% improvement in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p resolution with high graphics settings and a 70 watt TDP, but 23% better performance at 40 watts.
That said, you’re going to want to pair this chip with a strong discrete GPU, because AMD has prioritized the CPU rather than integrated graphics. The Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor has Radeon 610M integrated graphics with two RDNA 2 compute units with top speeds of 2.2 GHz.
The integrated graphics should be good enough to handle video and other basic operations, but for gaming you’re going to want something more powerful. And the first laptop expected to ship with the processor fits the bill.
Asus and AMD have announced that a new ROG Strix SCAR 17 gaming laptop is coming in August. It’s a 17 inch notebook with a 240 Hz display panel, Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 mobile graphics, 32GB of RAM, PCIe Gen 4 NVMe storage, RGB lighting effects built into the chassis, and an advanced cooling system that incorporates liquid metal and a vapor chamber.
It’s likely that AMD’s new processor will show up in other gaming laptops in the coming months, and that 3D V-Cache technology could eventually make its way to more laptop-class processors. AMD has been offering desktop and server chips with 3D V-cache since last year.
The write up states the CPU has 8 cores, but the AMD slides says it is a 16c/32t CPU.
Whoops, just fixed that. Thanks!
I think this technology will definitely be better suited for gaming laptops, compared to the desktop CPUs that have already been offering it.
The objection that many people have had to AMD’s desktop CPUs with 3D V-cache have been that the CPUs can’t be overclocked nearly as much, as there are voltage limitations.
That shouldn’t matter as much for a gaming laptop, as laptops don’t offer an ability to upgrade the cooler, so people don’t push unlocked laptop CPUs nearly as much.
The stacked cache makes it more difficult to cool compared to CPU with same power envelope that lacks it, though, as demonstrated with 5800X3D. Therefore it makes sense to launches them first on desktop platform, which has way more cooling potential than laptops, to figure out how to overcome the heat production.
I respectfully disagree.
The desktop parts use multiple times the power of the mobile chips, even on base frequency. On turbo they even go far higher. So on a mobile chip you don’t need to find a clever solution for the heat problem, cause there is none.
The heat becomes much more of a problem if you brutally force your chips to the physical limits. At that point the additional layers for the cache may become a real issue, but it only adds to the plethora of other problems you already got when going down that road.
So my guess would be, AMD went for the desktop part first, simply because they expected more money to get there. And you couldn’t even blame them for it.