No, you're not wrong
Share on"Who needs Intel's Optane when you have AMD's 3D V-Cache," asks Tom's Hardware rhetorically, referring to incredible transfer speeds.
Unbelievable speeds
Because AMD CPUs with the technology are so fast that they crush the fastest PCIe 5.0 NVMe chips. But how on earth? Because you can run a RAM disk (remember them from the "old days"?) on them and reach absolutely crazy numbers in CrystalDiskMark:
- 82 GB/s write
- 175 GB/s read
Here you have to believe your own eyes, for the fastest disks like Samsung's 990 Pro manages 7450/6900 MB/s sequential read-/ writing speed. AMD with 3D V-Cache is up in GB speeds per second.
There are two major challenges: price and available space
The software that makes it possible is called OSFMount, and unfortunately, as of today, there is a clear problem: AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU (just under NOK 10,000) has only 128 MB of such super-fast intermediate storage. If you want to get anywhere and be able to use this for something, you have to buy an AMD EPYC Genoa-X CPU that has a whopping 1.3 GB of L3 cache. The price of these is over NOK 30,000, converted from dollars.
The hope is that future CPUs will render NVMe chips and SSDs jobless and that you can potentially get TB/s speeds (which AMD's V-Cache is already theoretically capable of) built into the CPU.
