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AMD could enter ARM market with Sound Wave APU built on TSMC 3nm process

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283 points walterbell | 7 comments | 31 Oct 25 03:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.509s | source | bottom
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dwood_dev ◴[31 Oct 25 04:59 UTC] No.45768578[source]▶
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.

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spockz ◴[31 Oct 25 06:08 UTC] No.45768886[source]▶
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.

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1. codedokode ◴[31 Oct 25 06:23 UTC] No.45768959[source]▶
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.
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2. arjie ◴[31 Oct 25 06:29 UTC] No.45768981[source]▶
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).

3. Someone ◴[31 Oct 25 07:01 UTC] No.45769116[source]▶
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.
4. pxeger1 ◴[31 Oct 25 08:11 UTC] No.45769464[source]▶
> the most valuable resource is rack space

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

5. friendzis ◴[31 Oct 25 08:41 UTC] No.45769684[source]▶
> 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.

6. imtringued ◴[31 Oct 25 09:39 UTC] No.45770060[source]▶
Rack space limits include power limits. E.g. 10kw per rack.
7. cmrdporcupine ◴[31 Oct 25 12:35 UTC] No.45771340[source]▶
AWS, Google, Hetzner all offer a discount if you use an ARM64 VPS.

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