AMD Could Enter ARM Market with Sound Wave APU Built on TSMC 3nm Process
79 comments
·October 31, 2025stevefan1999
Legendary Chip Architect, Jim Keller, Says AMD ‘Stupidly Cancelled’ K12 ARM CPU Project After He Left The Company: https://wccftech.com/legendary-chip-architect-jim-keller-say...
Could be a revival but for different purposes
high_na_euv
Funny how some of his projects got cancelled like K12 at AMD or Royal Core at INTC and people always act like that was terrible decision, yet AMD is up like 100x on stock market and INTC... times gonna tell
guerrilla
Cult of personality... or maybe people just want cool stuff for fun.
pantulis
Anybody else finds it very confusing that this is called Sound Wave and it's not a specific chip for sound synthesis applications?
noelwelsh
From name you'd expect a simple sound card, but look deeper and there is more than meets the eye [1]
xoac
Not sure what their intention is of course, but nowadays there is A LOT of Cortexes in various sound gear. Plenty in things like Eurorack but also outboard equipment like the Eventide H9000 etc.
rwmj
I was hoping it'd be a very cool soundcard, perhaps with unlimited General Midi channels.
bitwize
Perhaps it is named after the Decepticon?
xbmcuser
Oh I hope the price is low enough that this be a real media box chip competitor fir streaming devices. Nvidia Shield Tegra chip from 2015 is still one of the best in this space. And with nvidia making all the AI money is not interested in making a new device. Apple TV the only real alternative does not support audio passthrough so is not as open as android or Linux media boxes.
darkamaul
Better (or simply more) ARM processors, no matter who makes them, are a win. They tend to be far more power-efficient, and with performance-per-watt improving each generation, pushing for wider ARM adoption is a practical step toward lowering overall energy consumption.
pjmlp
With the caveat that ARM isn't a industry standard like PC has become, thus while propritary OSes can thrive, FOSS has a much higher challenge other than OEM specific distros or downstream forks.
Stuff like this, https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Microsoft-Corporation/dp/15723171...
ahoka
Are ARM processors inherently power efficient? I doubt.
Performance per watt is increasing due to the lithography.
Also, Devon’s paradox.
ggm
Aside from lithography there's clever design. I don't think you can quantify that but it's not nothing.
eb0la
Actually power efficiency was a side effect of having a straightforward design in the first ARM processor. The BBC needed a cheap (but powerful) processor for the Acort computer and a RISC chip was When ARM started testing their processor, they found out it draw very little power...
... the rest is history.
jorvi
They aren't inherently power efficient because of technical reasons, but because of design culture reasons.
Traditionally x86 has been built powerful and power hungry and then designers scaled the chips down whereas it's the opposite for ARM.
For whatever reason, this also makes it possible to get much bigger YoY performance gains in ARM. The Apple M4 is a mature design[0] and yet a year later the M5 is CPU +15% GPU +30% memory bandwidth +28%.
The Snapdragon Elite X series is showing a similar trajectory.
So Jim Keller ended up being wrong that ISA doesn't matter. Its just that it's the people in the ISA that matter, not the silicon.
[0]its design traces all the way back to the A12 from 2018, and in some fundamental ways even to the A10 from 2016.
high_na_euv
As far as I know people aren't part of ISA :)
IshKebab
Do you have any actual evidence for that? Intel does care about power efficiency - they've been making mobile CPUs for decades. And I don't think they are lacking intelligent chip designers.
I would need some strong evidence to make me think it isn't the ISA that makes the difference.
high_na_euv
ISA is not that relevant, it is all about what you want to achieve with your CPU
coffeebeqn
How is running desktop Linux on these?
hmlwilliams
I run desktop linux via postmarketOS on a Lenovo Duet 5 (Snapdragon 7c). It isn't the most powerful device and the webcam doesn't work but other than that it works well and battery life is excellent
jesperwe
Sounds like a PERFECT chip for my next HomeAssistant box :-D
- Low power when only idling through events from the radio networks
- Low power and reasonable performance when classifying objects in a few video feeds.
- Higher power and performance when occasionally doing STT/TTS and inference on a small local LLM
nsbk
My thoughts exactly! Although I may end up getting some Mini M1/M2 variant with Asahi Linux instead
Findecanor
BTW. ChipsAndCheese has a recent article on MALL / Infinity Caches, evaluating it in the x86-based AMD Strix Halo APU:
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/evaluating-the-infinity-cache-i...
dwood_dev
My guess from previous reporting on this, it was an experiment that might not ever be released.
ARM isn't nearly as interesting given the strides both Intel and AMD have made with low power cores.
Any scenario where SoundWave makes sense, using Zen-LP cores align better for AMD.
adrian_b
AMD makes laptop CPUs with good performance per power consumption ratio, but they are designed for high power consumptions, typically for 28 W, or at least for 15 W.
AMD does not have any product that can compete with Intel's N-series or industrial Atom CPUs, which are designed for power consumptions of 6 W or of 10 W and AMD never had any Zen CPU for this power range.
If the rumors about this "Sound Wave" are true, then AMD will finally begin to compete again in this range of TDP, a market that they have abandoned many years ago (since the AMD Jaguar and Puma CPUs), because all their resources were focused on designing Zen CPUs for higher TDPs.
For cheap and low-power CPUs, the expensive x86-64 instruction decoder may matter, unlike for bigger CPUs, so choosing the Aarch64 ISA may be the right decision.
Zen compact cores provide the best energy efficiency for laptops and servers, especially for computation-intensive tasks, but they are not appropriate for cheap low-power devices whose computational throughput is less important than other features. Zen compact cores are big in comparison with ARM Cortex-X4, Intel Darkmont or Qualcomm cores and their higher performance is not important for cheap low-power devices.
Someone
The page this article got its info from (https://www.ithome.com/0/889/173.htm) says (according to Safari’s translation):
“IT Home News on October 13, @Olrak29_ found that the AMD processor code-named "Sound Wave" has appeared in the customs data list, confirming the company's processor development plan beyond the x86 architecture”
I think that means they are planning to export parts.
I think there still is some speculation involved as to what those parts are, and they might export them only for their own use, but is that likely?
spockz
It is interesting for AMD because having a on-par ARM chip means they can keep selling chips when the rest of the market switch to ARM. This is largely driven by Apple and by the cloud providers wanting more efficient higher density chips.
Apple isn’t going to switch back to AMD64 any time soon. Cloud providers will switch faster if X64 chips become really competitive again.
codedokode
I am not sure if cloud providers want ARM - the most valuable resource is rack space, so you want to use the most powerful CPU, not the one using less energy.
arjie
Well, Amazon does offer Graviton 4 (quite fast and useful stuff) along side their Epyc machines so there is some utility to them. A 9654 is much faster than a Graviton 4.
EDIT: Haha, I was going off our workloads but hilariously there are some HPC-like workloads where benchmarks show the Graviton 4 smoking a 9654 https://www.phoronix.com/review/graviton4-96-core/4
I suppose ours must have been more like the rest of the benchmarks (which show the 9654 faster than the Epyc).
Someone
Cooling takes up rack space, too. There also are workloads that aren’t CPU constrained, but GPU or I/O constrained. On such systems, it’s better to spend your heat budget on other things than CPUs.
friendzis
> the most valuable resource is rack space
The limit is power capacity and quite often thermal. Newer DCs might be designed with larger thermal envelopes, however rack space is nearly meaningless once you exhaust thermal capacity of the rack/isle.
Performance within thermal envelope is a very important consideration in datacenters. If a new server offers double performance at double power it is a viable upgrade path only for DCs that have that power reserve in the first place.
pxeger1
> the most valuable resource is rack space
I've always heard it's cooling capacity. I'm also pretty confident that's true
imtringued
Rack space limits include power limits. E.g. 10kw per rack.
dbdr
> given the strides both Intel and AMD have made with low power cores.
Any pointers regarding that? How does the computing power to watts ratio look these days across major CPU architectures?
LarsDu88
cough gaming device
wmf
I don't see why Sound Wave would have any advantage, even efficiency, over a similar Zen 5/6 design. Microsoft must really want ARM if they're having this chip made.
DeepYogurt
It could just be a play to make sure there's a second source to qualcomm
Findecanor
The core count is relatively low though. 2P + 4E, whereas Snapdragon-X are 8 or 10 performance cores, indicating that this could be for a low-end tablet ... or game console?
DeathArrow
They did countless attempts to use ARM but all failed. Consumers didn't care because they couldn't run their software. Microsoft won't solve the problem until they will provide a way to run all relevant software on ARM.
debugnik
Microsoft already designed a modified ARM ABI [1] compatible with emulated X86-64 just for this transition. But it's a Windows 11 feature. I wonder if the refusal of many of us to switch from Windows 10 is part of the reason why they're still idling on an ARM strategy.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/arm64ec-abi
p_l
Part of the issue was incomplete amd64 emulation on windows which is why several MS products continued to ship 32bit - because while they might recompile their software for ARM, business users had binary-only extensions that they expected to continue using.
wongarsu
A year or two ago I used a Windows 11 laptop with an ARM CPU, and at least for me everything just worked. The drivers weren't as good, but all my x86-64 software ran just fine
guiriduro
Its pretty decent. Decent enough in fact that I can run a Windows 11 ARM install on vmware Fusion on my macbook m4 pro, and it will happily run win arm and x86 binaries (via builtin MS x86 emulation) decently fast and without complaint (we're talking apps, gaming I haven't tried.)
Zardoz84
Apple did an excellent job doing the switch. I don't see why should fail here.
arjie
Well, I'm eager to use it. For my home server I use an old power-hungry Epyc 7B13. It's overkill but it can run a lot of things (my blog, other software I use, my family's various pre-configured MCPs we use in Custom GPTs, rudimentary bioinformatics). The truth though is that I hate having to cross-compile from my M1 Mac to the x86_64 server. I would much rather just do an ARM to ARM platform cross-compile (way easier to do and much faster on the Orbstack container platform).
So I went out looking for an ARM-based server of equivalent strength to a Mac Mini that I could find and there's really not that much out there. There's the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite which is in only really one actual buyable thing (The Lenovo Ideacentre) and some vaporware Geekom or something product. But this thing doesn't have very good Linux support (it's built for ARM Windows apparently) and it's much costlier than some Apple Silicon running Asahi Linux.
So I'm eventually going to end up with some M1 Ultra Studio or an M4 Mini running Asahi Linux, which seems like such a complete inversion of the days when people would make Hackintoshes.
heavyset_go
I want a hybrid APU, perhaps an x86 host with ARM co-processors that can be used to run arm64 code natively/do some clever virtualization. Or maybe the other way around, with ARM hosts and x86 co-processors. Or they can do some weird HMP stuff instead of co-processors.
GCUMstlyHarmls
Im too dumb to know why?
Why have both to run native arm64 code? Nearly anything you'd want is cross compiled/compilable (save some macOS stuff but that's more than just CPU architecture).
My understanding is that ARM chips can be more efficient? Hence them being used in phones etc.
I guess it would let you run android stuff "natively"?
Or perhaps you imagine running Blender in x64 mode and discord in the low wattage ARM chip?
ggm
Rosetta shows translation works. Why complicate the os with multiple ISA?
jillesvangurp
Or put differently, why bake the CPU instruction sets into the chips? What Apple has shown is that emulating x86 can actually rival or be faster than a natively running x86 chip. There are currently two major ones (ARM, x86) and an up-and-coming minor one (e.g. RISC-V), and lots of legacy ones (SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, etc.). All these can be emulated. Native compilation is an optimization that can happen at build time (traditional compilers), at distribution time (Android stores do this), just before the first run (Rosetta), or on the fly (QEMU).
Chip manufacturers need to focus on making power-efficient, high-performance workhorses. Apple figured this out first and got frustrated enough with Intel, who was more preoccupied with vendor lock-in than with doing the one thing they were supposed to do: developing best-in-class chips. The jump from x86 to M1 completely destroyed Intel’s reputation on that front. Turns out all those incremental changes over the years were them just moving deck chairs around. AMD was just tagging along and did not offer much more than them. They too got sidelined by Apple’s move. They never were much better in terms of efficiency and speed. So them now maybe getting back into ARM chips is a sign that times are changing and x86 is becoming a legacy architecture.
This shouldn’t matter. Both Apple and Microsoft have emulation capability. Apple is of course retiring theirs, but that’s more of a prioritization/locking strategy than it is for technical reasons. This is the third time they’ve pulled off emulation as a strategy to go to a new architecture: Motorola 68000 to PowerPC to x86 to ARM. Emulation has worked great for decades. It has broken the grip X86 has had on the market for four decades.
gsliepen
Could be an interesting chip for a future Raspberry Pi model? With Radeon having nice open source drivers, it would be easy to run a vanilla Linux OS on it. The TDP looks compatible as well.
It’s exciting to see AMD trying ARM again, competition always brings better chips for everyone.