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.
Apple isn’t going to switch back to AMD64 any time soon. Cloud providers will switch faster if X64 chips become really competitive again.
“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?
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).
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.
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.
Clearly, they want them, because there's demonstrated power savings.
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.
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.
>> 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