The Technical Workloads Where AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D CPUs Are Excellent

While the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D are promoted as great "gaming processors", these new Zen 4 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache also have great capabilities for various technical computing workloads thanks to the hefty cache size. In prior articles I've looked at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D in around 400 workloads on Linux while in this article I am looking more closely at these technical computing areas where these AMD Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors show the most strength and value outside of gaming.

The Ryzen 9 7900X3D as a reminder is a 12-core / 24-thread processor like the Ryzen 9 7900X but with a 4.4GHz base frequency compared to 4.7GHz with the 7900X. Both the 7900X and 7900X3D aim to boost to 5.6GHz. What makes the 7900X3D interesting is a doubling of the L3 cache from 64MB to 128MB while also the default TDP is lower at 120 Watts with the 7900X3D compared to 170 Watts with the 7900X.

The Ryzen 9 7950X3D with its 16 cores / 32 threads has a 4.2GHz base clock compared to 4.5GHz with the 7950X while both aim to boost to 5.7GHz. With the 7950X3D is also a 128MB L3 cache thanks to AMD 3D V-Cache and it carries a 120 Watt default TDP rating like the 7900X3D.

The Ryzen 9 7900X is currently retailing for around $450 USD while the 7900X3D is available for around $600 when you can find it in stock. The Ryzen 9 7950X is retailing for around $599 USD while the Ryzen 9 7950X3D retails for around $699 USD but as of writing this article is sold out at most internet retailers.

One of the most controversial aspects of these 7900X3D/7950X3D processors is the asymmetric CCD design with one CCD being cache optimized with access to the large 3D V-Cache while the other is frequency optimized to hit the high clock frequencies for workloads not able to leverage the large cache size. AMD and Microsoft have been working on improvements to Windows 11 for dealing with proper task placement between the different CCDs while on the Linux side we haven't seen any AMD-specific improvements. In any case for Linux gaming these X3D processors have been performing well and for many technical computing workloads.

For this fresh round of testing, the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X vs. 7900X3D vs. 7950X vs. 7950X3D was today's focus while testing on an ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO motherboard with 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 GSKILL EXPO memory and Ubuntu 23.04 development with the Linux 6.2.2 kernel.

Moving onto the benchmarks, in this article is looking at the technical/scientific computing areas where these Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 7950X3D processors are performing very well and showing much value outside of gaming. Even with the current Linux kernel and its scheduler, for these workloads the 7900X3D/7950X3D can already make a compelling business case for some workloads.

In addition to looking at the raw performance results, the CPU power consumption (and in turn the performance-per-Watt) is being looked at along with the CPU core temperature and the performance-per-dollar.

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