Are AMD’s Zen 3 Ryzen CPUs with 3D cache going into mass production in November, and will B2 stepping be available in late December?

AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, based on the new Zen 3 stacked-chiplet design with V-cache, are expected to enter mass production as early as next month, Greymon55 reports. The leaker also states that AMD Ryzen processors with B2 stepping will ship and be available at retail by the end of 2021.

AMD has already officially confirmed that the Ryzen CPUs based on the Zen 3 architecture with 3D V-cache will still be released on the AM4 platform in the first quarter of 2022. Based on the tweet, AMD is expected to begin mass production of these chips as early as next month, which could also mean we’ll likely see the announcement at CES 2022, with a February 2022 launch planned. This would be an appropriate positioning as an intermediate spurt before then Zen 4 including AM5 comes on the market.

Two things:
ZEN3 V-cache will be mass produced in November.
ZEN3 B2 has been shipped and is expected to be available at the end of December.

— Greymon55 (@greymon55) October 19, 2021

In addition to the new Ryzen 3D V-Cache chips, AMD is expected to begin shipping its Zen 3 CPUs in B2 Stepping in late December. AMD’s Robert Hallock confirmed that B2 stepping doesn’t bring any architectural changes, but new stepping generally leads to better overall stability and clock performance compared to what we currently find on the market. Users who get the B2 stepping may not notice any significant changes, but we’ll be happy to see if the new revision has some advantages over the B1 stepping.

Both the Ryzen CPUs with 3D V-Cache and the B2 Stepping-based Zen 3 CPUs will have to prove themselves as competition to Intel’s Alder Lake 12th Gen desktop lineup, which goes on sale Nov. 04, 2021. As a result, AMD is expected to introduce more significant price cuts to its existing Zen 3 lineup to make it more competitive with Intel’s new lineup. Intel will have a big platform advantage over AMD on paper with the introduction of DDR5 and PCI Express 5.0, but it will also come at a higher cost. AMD’s real answer to Alder Lake and its refresh, known as Raptor Lake, won’t be available until Q4 then. The Zen 4-based Raphael chips will be released in the fourth quarter of 2022.

For the Ryzen CPUs with 3D V-Cache, expect a slight optimization on TSMC’s 7nm process nodes, up to 64MB of stacked cache per CCD (96MB L3 per CCD), and as a result, up to 15% average performance increase in games as well. The whole thing will remain compatible with the AM4 platform and existing motherboards, and the TDP is not likely to change either.