We often use the terms CCD, CCX, and cIOD, as in our review of the Ryzen 9 5900X, but not often do we get the chance to actually see the components of a chip cut out of silicon before our eyes. Fortunately, photographer Fritzchens Fritz is doing God's work and snapping silicon with great clarity. Their latest project is AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X and Zen 3 architecture.

And Fritz has also pulled off the big job of the century. He succeeded in removing the heat spreader from the multi-chip package almost completely.

Well, never mind. [This is the process of removing the metal heat spreader from the top of the chip, exposing the die itself. This is because the heat spreaders on these chips are soldered, as opposed to the thermal paste used on some of Intel's older and low-end chips.

Although temperature-friendly, soldered integrated heat spreaders (IHS) are difficult to remove.

Nevertheless, a clear image of the newly redesigned Zen 3 CCX (below) remains; at least five of the eight-core CCX can be seen. And even the six-core Ryzen 5 5600X has an eight-core complement, but two of those cores are not functional.

The Zen 3 CCX is a fairly significant change from the Zen 2 CCX. Both are 7nm parts in a single chiplet package (CCD), but the Zen 3 CCX has a total of 8 cores, while the Zen 2 CCX has only 4 cores.

Thus, only one CCX per CCD is needed to accommodate the 8-core chiplet, and the redesign has cache benefits.

The 4-core CCX required a long round trip through the accompanying cIOD die to communicate between clusters of 4 cores, whereas the 8-core CCX does not. This means that for tasks that require a handful of fast cores, such as gaming, the time it takes to move data is greatly reduced. Instead, all of these cores can access the same L3 cache, resulting in a significant performance boost for these tasks.

Therein lies part of the secret to Zen 3's success over Zen 2, and even over Intel; what you see in Fritzchens Fritz's photo is the result of a tremendous engineering effort to close the gap in the game.

On Fritzchens Fritz's Flickr page, you can see the entire (slightly gross) process of taking apart a Ryzen 5 5600X. Also, check out this great diagram created by Reddit user Locuza using Fritz's die shots.

Also, the Ryzen 5 5600X is a sight to see in action. Alan is currently testing it, and the full review will be posted here soon, but *spoiler alert* it's a great gaming chip.

"It has everything a gamer could ask for: 10900K performance for half the price.

"What's more, this chip also comes with a cooler.

Thanks to Fritzchens Fritz for these great photos.