AMD has officially unveiled the Ryzen 9 7945X3D as the “fastest gaming processor” for laptops . According to the Californian firm, it will surpass Intel’s top of the range, the Core i9-13980HX.
We told you a few days ago: AMD was going to transfer 3D cache technology to the laptop segment. No sooner said than done. Last January it announced the versions for desktop computers and now comes a variant for laptops that aims to beat Intel’s Raptor Lake.
How is the Ryzen 9 7945X3D
AMD debuted the “3D Vertical Cache” technology a few years ago in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with very good performance results. If you follow us regularly, you should know that it is about the use of 3D stacked third-level cache .
This type of design of the L3 cache offers important advantages, at the silicon level and at the performance level especially in games. And all this while maintaining the same socket of the regular versions and all the advantages of its technology, in this case those derived from the ZEN4 microarchitecture that we have already seen in the Ryzen 7000 that have been marketed up to now.
The Ryzen 9 7945X3D is based on the “Dragon Range” multi-chip module and will be manufactured on 5-6nm processes. It is essentially a mobile-optimized BGA variant of the desktop “Raphael” MCM, with a higher degree of power optimization. The processor features 16 “Zen 4” CPU cores spread across two CCDs, each with 1MB of L2 cache.
The 3D vertical cache is only applied on one of the two chiplets (CCD). The first CCD has 96 MB of L3 cache thanks to the 3DV cache, while the second CCD has 32 MB. It is the same design that we saw in the desktop version. The goal is that the first CCD with the built-in 3DV cache is in charge and is specially optimized for playing games, while additional workloads (such as audio stack, network stack, background services, etc) are handled. by the second CCD.
With this design, it is possible to greatly improve gaming performance even at lower power consumption. In the attached graph we can see that the Ryzen 9 7945X3D improves performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider by 11% with a TDP of 70 watts compared to the same model without 3D cache, and the improvement is 23% when we use a TDP 40 watts. This means that the 3D stacked L3 cache enables more efficient and powerful CPU designs for gaming.
Despite its power-constrained form factor, the processor can scale to a working frequency of up to 5.4 GHz . The processor supports dual-channel DDR5 memory and supports 28-lane PCI-Express Gen 5. AMD claims that the Ryzen 9 7945X3D is, on average, 15% faster in games than its current flagship processor, the Ryzen 9 7945HX, and faster than Intel’s flagship, but as we see in the attached graph the improvement performance can be up to 153%.
The Ryzen 9 7945X3D is expected to debut on the ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 17 X3D gaming laptop , which will be available from August 22. This laptop will be configured with a powerful GeForfce RTX 4090 Mobile , will have 32 GB of DDR5 memory and will position itself at the top of the sector. In terms of performance it will be an impressive team, there is no doubt about that.