Die shots of AMD's all-new 5000 series CPUs have showed up at outlet Hardwareluxx, taken by one of its community members Fritzchens Fritz, who had the courage to destroy a shiny new Ryzen 5 5600X for the sole purpose of seeing exactly what Zen 3 looks like under the hood.
Images credit: Fritzchens Fritz
You'll notice the destruction when the enthusiast de-lidded the processor, but there are some more interesting pictures in the album. Looking at the pictures, you can see both the I/O Die (IOD) and the Core Compute Die (CCD) that houses the eight Zen 3 cores on the Ryzen 5 5600X (two of them are disabled to make a six-core chip).
We can also see the mounting pads next to the CCD for a second CCD, which would be installed for a Ryzen 9 chip. In the closeup shots, you can see some of the CPU cores themselves and the L3 cache in the middle of the CCD. Moving over to the IOD, you can see all the components that make up that unit, as well.
If you are unfamiliar with Zen 2 and Zen 3 architectures, they work on a multi-die based system. The cores and cache are housed in their own dies called CCDs, while the memory, I/O, and communication between CCDs (via the Infinity Fabric) is handled by the I/O Die. This allows AMD to use different nodes for different dies, which is more efficient for manufacturing CPUs. Specifically, the I/O die is on GlobalFoundries' older 12nm process, while the CCDs use the 7nm node from TSMC. The bigger 12nm I/O die is much cheaper to produce.
It's cool to see real shots of the new Ryzen 5000 series CCDs and I/O die, not just animated slides from AMD, even if a Ryzen 5 5600X had to be sacrificed in the process.
