One of the key characteristics of Ryzen "X3D" processors, chips with AMD's 3D V-Cache tech, is that they suffer reduced clock rates compared to the same CPU without. The cut to clock rates was severe in earlier generations, but the Ryzen 7 9800X3D only loses 300 MHz from the Ryzen 7 9700X's boost clock thanks to a revolutionary design that puts the cache die underneath the CPU die, improving thermal transfer.

Well, according to leaks, the anticipated Ryzen 9 9950X3D may not actually suffer any drop in clock rates at all versus the extant Ryzen 9 9950X. Frequent leaker HXL (@9550pro on Xwitter) posted a couple of tweets over the Christmas holiday that give the impression that choosing the "X3D" version of the CPU may mean no compromise at all.

The first tweet was this one, replying to a post inquiring about the clock rates of "R9 X3D". While HXL didn't explicitly talk about the clocks, they did say that the Ryzen 9 9950X3D scores approximately the same as the Ryzen 9 9950X in Cinebench R23. Since this benchmark pretty much only cares about core architecture, core count, and core clocks, it's a good indication that clocks are very similar if not the same.

However, this later tweet is more explicit. It doesn't get much clearer than "Zen5 X3D No frequency debuff." On its own, that's promising, but it's easy to assume that the full clock rate only applies to one of the processor's two CCDs, or Core Complex Dice. That's how the Ryzen 9 7950X3D works, after all, yet the tweet above about the Cinebench scores gives reason to doubt that hypothesis. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D does consistently perform slightly behind the Ryzen 9 7950X; if the 9950X3D is consistently matching the 9950X, it does suggest clock rates are identical.

Many people were hoping for a sixteen-core Ryzen processor with 3D V-Cache on both CCDs, but such a product really doesn't make a lot of sense. For one thing, it would be very expensive to make -- the 3D V-Cache bonding process is challenging, to say nothing of the fact that you'd be getting five separate pieces of silicon in one CPU -- and for another thing, it probably wouldn't be that good.

You see, very few games actually make effective use of more than eight CPU cores, and of those rare few games, almost none of them actually benefit from 3D V-Cache. There are a select few HPC-type workloads that do benefit greatly from 3D V-Cache, but if you're seriously running those apps, you probably have access to much beefier server hardware. AMD's expected to announce the new Ryzen processors at CES 2025.