TECH TALK
AMD 3D V-Cache Boosts Gaming Performance
WE’VE KNOWN FOR AGES that large caches can help improve performance, though larger caches can also increase latency and counteract those gains. It’s a balancing act, and L1 caches have been sitting in the 32KB to 96KB range for quite some time now.
Jarred Walton
© 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.