© AMD
L2 caches have grown from around 128KB per core in the 90s to today’s 512KB to 1MB, sometimes even 2MB, per core. But it’s the L3 cache sizes that have really ballooned. Intel’s various mainstream Core processors have included 8MB of L3 cache going back to the Bloomfield and Lynnfield chips in the late 2000s. In contrast, AMD chose to put 16MB of L3 cache (per eight cores) on its first- and secondgeneration Ryzen processors, then doubled that to 32MB of L3 (still per eight cores) on the third- and fourth-generation CPUs, Zen 2 and Zen 3. One big difference between them was that Zen 3 made it a unified L3 cache, instead of a split 16MB+16MB cache, which reduced latencies and improved performance. But AMD had bigger plans.