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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)