It seems that the rumor mill was right about AMD’s latest mobile gaming processor, as the tech giant officially announced the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. But there’s a catch.
The only caveat is that this processor will be available for a single laptop, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D. And that’s a shame as this is probably the best mobile chip ever, and the first one to use the excellent 3D V-Cache technology. It’s similar to the Ryzen 9 7945HX except that, according to PC Gamer, it has the full 64MB of L3 cache bonded on top of one of its eight-core chiplets. It also has the same TDP and the same peak 5.4GHz clock speed, if the chiplet doesn’t have the extra L3 of course.
According to AMD, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D’s full specs are as follows: Zen 4 architecture, 16 cores and 32 threads, L2 cache of 16GB and L3 cache of 128GB, TDP between 55 and 75W, and an AMD Radeon 610M GPU.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor will be launching on August 22nd, 2023, which is just after Gamescom.
AMD is wasting a great opportunity
Considering how incredible the 3D V-Cache technology is, as it manages to get extra performance out of a chip without having to bump up the amount of energy or cooling that chip would normally need, it’s a shame that only one laptop will get to benefit from it.
Especially since this tech is ideal for portable machines, as it allows some of the best gaming laptops to get great performance without having to risk additional ventilation issues.
And this chip is even more valuable to AMD because it could give both the Intel Raptor Lake-HX and the upcoming 14th-gen CPU refresh a run for the money. It really seems that AMD’s Dragon Range series could be one of the best AMD processors and even one of the best processors in general. So it feels like Team Red is squandering a real chance to push Team Blue’s hold on the processor market.
And this isn’t the only time AMD has done this either. Previously it released the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D processor in limited supply only at Micro Center, which was a baffling decision to say the least. And back in 2022, the tech giant launched the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D but it was produced in low volume and was the only 5000-series chip to sport the extra cache until 2023.
