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AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 179 posts

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#41
post #4

Crazy to think that my first personal computer's entire storage (was 160MB IIRC?) could fit into the L3 of a single consumer CPU! It's probably not possible architecturally, but it would be amusing to see an entire early 90's OS running entirely in the CPU's cache.

My first PC had a 20MB HDD with 512Kb of RAM. So yeah that could fit into cache 10 times now.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#42
post #30

9950X3D2? AMD, who is making you name your products like this? At some point just give up and name the chip a UUID already.

Like your UUID joke but agree with sibling comment that 9950X3D2 is actually a good name.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#43

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

> Now it's listed at $4k...

You can buy 128GB of DDR5-6000 with a 9950X3D (not this newest X2 version, but still a $699 CPU) and a motherboard and a case for $2800 right now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails?ItemList=Com...

If you don't need 128GB, there are quality 64GB kits for under $700 on Newegg right now, which is cheaper than this CPU.

If someone needs to build something now and can wait to upgrade RAM in a year or two, 32GB kits are in the $370 range.

I don't like this RAM price spike either, but in the context of building a high-end system with a 16-core flagship CPU like this and probably an expensive GPU, it's still reasonable to build a system. If you must have 128GB of RAM it can be done with bundles like the one I linked above but I'd recommend waiting at least 6 months if you can. There are signs that prices are falling now that panic-buying has started to trail off.

128GB of RAM should not cost $4K even in this market.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#44
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/blob/main/src/soc/intel...

Context: Early in the firmware boot process the memory controller isn't configured yet so the firmware uses the cache as RAM. In this mode cache lines are never evicted since there's no memory to evict them to.

I remember the talk about the Wii/WiiU hacking they intentionally kept the early boot code in cache so that the memory couldn’t be sniffed or modified on the ram bus which was external to the CPU and thus glitchable.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#46
post #13
post #4

Crazy to think that my first personal computer's entire storage (was 160MB IIRC?) could fit into the L3 of a single consumer CPU! It's probably not possible architecturally, but it would be amusing to see an entire early 90's OS running entirely in the CPU's cache.

I wonder how much faster dos would boot, especially with floppy seek times...

You can get close with a VM, but there's overhead in device emulation that slows things down.

Consider a VM where that kind of stuff has been removed, like the firecracker hypervisor used for AWS Lambda. You're talking milliseconds.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#47

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

> Now it's listed at $4k... You can buy 128GB of DDR5-6000 with a 9950X3D (not this newest X2 version, but still a $699 CPU) and a motherboard and a case for $2800 right now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails?ItemList=Com... If you don't need 128GB, there are quality 64GB kits for under $700 on Newegg right now, which is cheaper than this CPU. If someone needs to build something now and can wait to upgr…

No such bundle deals where I am. Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k.

Cheapest 64GB kit is $930.

The kit I was oh-so-close to buying was two 6400 64GB sticks.

Not gonna buy now, not that desperate. I have a spare AM4 board, DDR4 memory and heck even CPU, I'll ride this one out. Likely skip AM5 entirely if something doesn't drastically change.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#48
post #37

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

I really want a x3d because a game I play is heavily single threaded, I have the income and the financial stability but I can't in any good conscious upgrade to am5 with the ram prices. It's insane

Yep exactly the same situation.

I would not be surprised if we see casualties in adjacent markets, such as motherboards, coolers and whatnot.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it's listed at $4k... You can buy 128GB of DDR5-6000 with a 9950X3D (not this newest X2 version, but still a $699 CPU) and a motherboard and a case for $2800 right now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails?ItemList=Com... If you don't need 128GB, there are quality 64GB kits for under $700 on Newegg right now, which is cheaper than this CPU. If someone needs to build something now and can wait to upgr…

No such bundle deals where I am. Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k. Cheapest 64GB kit is $930. The kit I was oh-so-close to buying was two 6400 64GB sticks. Not gonna buy now, not that desperate. I have a spare AM4 board, DDR4 memory and heck even CPU, I'll ride this one out. Likely skip AM5 entirely if something doesn't drastically change.

> Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k.

That's not far from the bundle deal above, once you subtract the $700 CPU.

If you really need 128GB the 5600 kit is fine. Having 208MB of total cache on the CPU means the real world difference between a 5600 kit and a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases.

If you don't need to upgrade then clearly don't force an upgrade right now. I just wanted to comment that $4K for 128GB of RAM is a very bad price right now, even with the current situation.

Re: AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

#50

Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.

I am glad I decisively ordered 96GB (2x48) DDR5 ECC back in June, alongside the 9800x3d.

I hope this is still enough for the planned upgrade to Zen7 in 2028.

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