AMD’s Ryzen 9 desktop processors include two “Core Complex Dice”, or “CCDs”, which is to say that the processors’ 12 or 16 CPU cores are spread across two pieces of silicon. The company’s top 3D V-Cache-equipped CPU, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, is known for only including 3D V-Cache on one of its two CCDs.
In theory, this should be a bonus, as it allows the chip to have some cores that clock higher than is possible with 3D V-Cache, and still have another eight cores equipped with the extra cache. That way, it can cater to workloads that mainly benefit from high clocks or big caches—but in practice, it can be tedious to manage.
If you’re mainly gaming, you’re basically always going to want everything to run on the 3D V-Cache CCD. Wouldn’t it be nice if AMD sold such a chip? For its part, AMD says that it doesn’t sell a chip with that configuration as, apparently, the extra L3 cache somewhat negates the benefit of having such a big cache by increasing access latency.
While we find AMD’s reason for not selling a “dual V-Cache” version of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D a bit curious—after all, the company sells Milan-X CPUs with extra cache on every single chiplet—the fact remains that games typically perform best on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in any case. If you’re buying a CPU primarily or strictly for gaming, stick with the eight-core model. You’re not going to get anything from those extra cores in the vast majority of games.