While the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition may share the exact specifications with the original model, there is a notable change in its manufacturing process. Those who may have believed that AMD simply flipped the switch to restart fabbing of the iconic processor should know that is not the case, and the chip manufacturer actually had to re-engineer it so that a newer process could be used. David McAfee, VP and GM of AMD’s Radeon and Ryzen divisions, clarified (via Tom’s Hardware) how the Ryzen 7 5800X3D made its comeback.
“It’s not as simple as just bringing back the 5800X3D,” McAfee said. “The original stacking process that was used at TSMC changed when we went from first-gen to second-gen cache, so we had to re-engineer that product, and there actually was a fair amount of development that went into bringing back the 5800X3D.”
– David McAfee, AMD VP and GM Radeon and Ryzen
Now, when McAfee refers to the 2nd-gen CACHE, he is not talking about the reversed stacking seen with the Zen5 9000-series X3D processor, where the 3D-CACHE was “flipped” to the top of the die. Here, the devil in the detail is the bonding process being used. The original 5800X3D used a different bonding process, which has since been phased out and changed when the 7000-series launched, and then used again when the 9000 series was released. This new 10th Anniversary Edition 5800X3D, a reference to 10 years since the AM4 platform launch and not the 2022 release of the original 5800X3D, used the process seen with the 7000 series, aka 2nd gen.
“It completely changed the characteristics of how those two pieces of silicon are bonded together and how they were stacked together, and so when that first-gen facility really kind of went offline, then it meant there was a whole, you know, body of engineering work that had to be done to understand if we could even migrate the 5800X3D to the new, second-generation stacking process,”
– David McAfee, AMD VP and GM Radeon and Ryzen
So there you have it. Something sort of old matched with something slightly newer to bring back a classic. It’s also been theorized that the old process getting phased out played a contributing factor to the disappearing inventory of original 5800X3D and 5700X3D processors.