In the ongoing battle between Nvidia, Intel and AMD, otherwise known as Team Green, Team Blue and Team Red, both companies have continually stepped up their hardware in an effort to gain superiority. This time around, it’s AMD that’s on the front foot, announcing the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor, which the company says is its first mobile processor to use the company’s 3D V-Cache tech.
That’s a fair amount of tech jargon to say that we’re about to see some (even more) ridiculously powerful laptops. We’ll first see the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D in the upcoming Asus ROG Scar 17 X3D, a variant on the existing line of souped-up gaming laptops.
AMD’s confident that it’s got the “world’s fastest mobile gaming processor” on its hands. And, looking at some of the specs, it’s looking promising.
AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D and 3D V-Cache explained
Based on the company’s Zen 4 architecture, the new Ryzen 9 laptop chip wields 16 cores and 32 threads upon which to reach 5.4GHz boost clock speeds. That’s damn powerful. It also houses 144MB of AMD 3D V-Cache, designed to improve performance further.
Other than a fancy-sounding phrase, what actually does AMD 3D V-Cache refer to? At a basic level, it’s an extra layer of cache on top of the CPU that helps handle more processes more efficiently. Included on the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D is 128MB of L3 cache and 16MB of L2 cache, which can be accessed quicker than system memory. This technology has been used with some of AMD’s desktop CPUs but not its laptop chips, until now.
According to internal testing results, AMD claims that the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D produces an average of 15% faster frame rate performance than the non-3D chip. This includes better performance on graphically-demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
Further details about the ROG laptop are incoming but there’s a spec sheet with what’s in store. Listed at the moment is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, along with a 240Hz 2560 x 1440 17.3-inch display.
When paired with a top-of-the-line graphics card, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D looks to power even greater performance than existing laptop CPUs. For desktop gamers who aren’t necessarily looking for power at all costs, AMD announced the Radeon RX 7600 earlier in the year, a sub-$500 GPU in direct competition with the Nvidia RTX 4060.
Expect to see the beefy new AMD chip starting on 22 August 2023. We’ll let you know about local availability and pricing as we learn more.
