AMD's Secret Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual 3D V-Cache CPU Is Real According To ASRock

There is plenty of reason to believe that AMD is getting ready to add a Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 processor to its lineup, and perhaps the most telling evidence yet is a press release by ASRock that shouts out the not-yet-released chip. According to ASRock, several of its socket AM5 motherboards "fully support the newly launched AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2."

The press release went live at the beginning of the week, but there is just one tiny problem: AMD hasn't actually announced, launched, or released the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, despite ASRock claiming otherwise. We double checked and there are no references to the flagship chip on any of AMD's public websites.

"The newly introduced AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 processor offers more cache than ever, giving it higher gaming performance on top of the already extremely performing predecessor. ASRock's AM5 motherboard is able to support the newly launched processors by simply downloading and installing the latest BIOS from the ASRock official website," ASRock states.

Nothing about the announcement suggests that we're dealing with a typo. Instead, the most likely explanations are that either ASRock got the date wrong and posted its press release before it was supposed to, or AMD changed the launch date at the last minute and ASRock neglected to alter the timing of its own announcement, as first spotted by Videocardz.

Either way, it seems pretty clear to us that the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is indeed real. The question is, when will it actually launch, and that remains a mystery for now. We saw the chip listed in an EEC filing back in January, and just before that, it had made the rounds in multiple benchmark leaks.

Other than being a new flagship processor, what makes the Ryzen 9 9950X3D interesting is that it purportedly slaps heaps of 3D V-Cache on both core complex dies (CCDs). That hasn't been the case on AMD's existing Ryzen 9 processors with second-generation 3D V-Cache, and the upshot of such a design is not having to wonder if a game is running on the so-called 'correct' CCD.

In contrast, only half of the cores on both the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and previous generation Ryzen 9 7950X3D benefit from the presence of 3D V-Cache, instead of all 16 cores as will be the case on the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.

According to past leaks, the 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 will have a 5.6GHz max boost clock, which is 100MHz slower than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, and 192MB of L3 cache compared to 128MB. It's also tipped for a 200W TDP, which is up from 170W.