[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.

[overfeed]

> 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

A cursory search shows that the AMD APU used in the Valve Steam Deck draws 3-15W. Limiting the TDP to 6W on a Steam Deck is fine for Linux in desktop mode.

[adrian_b]

That is a custom APU made by AMD for a certain customer.

It is not a device that AMD sells on the open market, so it does not compete with the ubiquitous Intel N-series CPUs or with the Arm-based CPUs from various vendors.

Like I have said, since Jaguar and Puma, which are older than the first Zen, AMD has never sold on the open market any CPU/APU designed for a TDP of 10 W or less.

While for some AMD APUs, like Ryzen Z1, which are designed for a TDP of 15 W, their specification says that they have a TDP that is configurable down to 9 W, when such CPUs are configured for a lower TDP than they are optimized for, they become inefficient, by having a bigger die area, i.e. a higher cost, and a lower energy efficiency, in comparison with the CPUs that have been specifically designed for that lower power.

[overfeed]

You've unsubtly moved the goalposts from claiming the inexistence of low-power AMD CPUs, to a narrower definition of consumer processor. Your initial assertion was rather absolute, and falsifiable.

>> 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

[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?

[wmf]

I think the chips are being imported from Taiwan to the US. At this point they are prototypes being tested. AMD wouldn't make a chip this complex for their own use; these were likely ordered by Microsoft or Valve.

[LeFantome]

Valve seems like a reasonable guess honestly.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[pxeger1]

> the most valuable resource is rack space

I've always heard it's cooling capacity. I'm also pretty confident that's true

[cmrdporcupine]

AWS, Google, Hetzner all offer a discount if you use an ARM64 VPS.

Clearly, they want them, because there's demonstrated power savings.

[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