What just happened? AMD Zen architecture is celebrating its 5th anniversary, and with it, the chipmaker confirmed it will be refreshing the Zen 3 processors in early 2022. These new processors will employ AMD's new 3D chiplet technology, which will increase the amount of V-Cache on the chip, delivering a performance uplift of 15 percent over the current generation.

In a friendly conversation between John Taylor, AMD's CMO, and Robert Hallock, director of technical marketing, the two confirmed the Ryzen 5000 series refresh, which will be compatible with AM4 motherboards. Moreover, they also mentioned a new laptop series is coming in early 2022, featuring a "Power Management" framework capable of balancing the CPU load and power consumption to maximize power efficiency.

The naming of the new CPU series hasn't been confirmed. However, considering the "generational leap" they bring and the difference between the Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series (Zen to Zen+), they will most likely be the Ryzen 6000.

During the conversation, Robert Hallock also confirmed we will see Ryzen processors moving to a new platform in late 2022. Robert added the new platform will support PCIe 5.0, DDR5 memory and compatibility with existing AM4 CPU coolers.

Also read: AMD vs. Intel: The Evolution of CPU Gaming Performance

The first time AMD mentioned its new 3D chiplet technology was in June of this year, where it explained that adding layers of cache (3D V-Cache) on top of the compute chiplets would result in a significant performance increase.

To prove its claims, AMD compared a standard Ryzen 9 5900X's performance with that of Ryzen 9 5900X prototype with 192MB of 3D V-Cache, both clocked at 4.0GHz. Here, you could see gaming performance improving by as much as 25 percent, depending on the title.

Besides the June announcement of the 3D V-Cache, AMD talked more about it during HotChips, giving us a deeper look at the technology and showing how it will be applied in future designs.