AMD EPYC Milan-X With 3D V-Cache Technology Announced; Packs Whopping 804MB Cache

AMD has officially announced a new variant of its third-gen server grade CPU -- the AMD EPYC Milan-X, which is also the world's first CPU to ship with 3D V-cache technology. The Milan-X is an upgraded version of Milan that uses stacked cache memory (L3) packing technology.

The AMD Milan-X is manufactured using TSMC N7 fabrication, which offers a total of 768MB of L3 cache. This is thrice as much as of the 3rd Gen EPYC CPUs along with up to 64 cores and 128GB threads. As per the compatibility, the Milan-X is compatible with the motherboards that support Milan (with an SP3 socket). With just a BIOS upgrade, businesses can use the new CPU on the old server board.

Do note that, AMD revealed the 3D V-Cache technology back in June 2021 at Computex and the Milan-X is the first product to ship with this technology. Hence, we can expect to see consumer CPUs with the 3D V-Cache technology hit the market in the next few months.

AMD EPYC Milan-X Features

As of now, there is no official confirmation if there will be any additional power draw due to the V-Cache. There are two ways to look into it -- the company could slightly lower clock speed to maintain a similar power draw on the Milan-X as of Milan. Else, the Milan-X might draw a slightly higher power, when compared to Milan, which has a TDP of 280W.

Do note that, the company has not done any changes to the CPU architecture and is based on the Zen 3 architecture. All the performance improvement that it has obtained comes from the additional L3 cache. Hence, we could expect the CPUs with Zen 4 architecture and 3D V-Cache to be a lot faster, and efficient.

Due to the massive increase in the cache memory, the Milan-X might cost a lot more than the regular Milan or the 3rd Gen EPYC processor. Not just that, due to the additional cache, the Milan-X is said to be 66 percent faster than the Milan, which in itself should be a good reason for businesses to upgrade.

According to the company, the EPYC Milan-X will hit the market by Q1 2022. As of now, there is no official confirmation on the pricing of the Milan-X. All this improvement will trickle down to consumer products very soon, which is the need of the hour to compete against the Intel Alder Lake CPUs.