It's officially official: AMD's 3D V-Cache is finally coming to notebooks with the launch of the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. Unsurprisingly, the company says it'll be the fastest mobile gaming CPU in the world. This is a watershed moment for mobile gaming as this huge market was previously not invited to the V-Cache party. Previously, AMD had only bequeathed its stacks of L3 cache to Ryzen desktop and Epyc data center CPUs. So, it's finally rounding out its portfolio by dropping it onto its flagship Zen 4 Dragon Range mobile CPU.
This announcement from AMD was anticipated, as several days ago, specs leaked for an upcoming Asus ROG Strix gaming laptop that included an X3D CPU nobody had ever heard of before. It turns out that it is a real product using the company's new flagship gaming CPU, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. This is AMD's existing flagship Dragon Range gaming CPU with an extra 64MB of L3 cache for 128MB. Combined with the 16MB of L2 it already has, we arrive at 144MB of L2 and L3 cache.
Compared to the current CPU, TDP is the same at 55W though AMD notes it can be adjusted to 75W as well. The only major difference between the two CPUs is the base clock on the V-Cache SKU has been lowered 200MHz to 2.3GHz. Both chips offer the same core count and max boost clock of 5.4GHz.
This is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU with Radeon 610M integrated graphics. It uses two eight-core CCDs, and only one of them has the V-Cache on top of it, like its desktop counterpart, so it's an asymmetric design. AMD has previously claimed this allows for a "best of both worlds" situation where applications that can benefit from V-Cache can run on that CCD, while productivity applications that don't need it can run on the other CCD and benefit from its higher clock speeds.
AMD claims in its marketing materials the new CPU is "more than 15% faster, on average" than the existing 7945HX CPU in games at 1080p. Like always with V-Cache, not every game will benefit, but AMD's chart shows a 44% improvement over the non-V-Cache version in Cyberpunk 2077. On the other end of the spectrum is League of Legends, which runs 5% slower on the X3D CPU.
Also, one tidbit rustling our jimmies is if you look at the upper-right of the chart above, it says "up to." We're old enough to remember that in January 2023, an AMD PR person was asked by PC World about using "up to" language for the Radeon 7900 series launch. He stated, "We were called out for our 'up to' messaging, [and] I promise we will not do that again." You can listen to those comments at this timestamped link. Perhaps that promise only applies to GPU launches, not CPUs.
Regardless, the Radeon 7945HX3D will launch on August 22nd with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 gaming laptop. This desktop replacement notebook will sport a 17.3-inch 240Hz 2560 x 1440 panel, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVME SSD. It's unknown what its price will be, but we can all do the math here and expect it to be at least $3,500.
AMD says it's partnering with Asus to launch its newest CPU, so it remains to be seen whether it'll show up in notebooks from other companies or whether additional 3D V-Cache mobile CPUs will launch soon. AMD might be keeping its powder dry while waiting for Intel's Raptor Lake refresh and Meteor Lake, reportedly coming around October.
