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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

AMD has been making ARM chips for a long time (they bought Xilinx and have been an ARM licensee for forever). This is just their first APU (graphics plus cpu) with an ARM core as the CPU.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc....

Anybody else finds it very confusing that this is called Sound Wave and it's not a specific chip for sound synthesis applications?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Now to do speculation on top of speculation on top of speculation: Valve's next vr headset deckard / steam frame is also rumored to be using an ARM chip, and with them being quite close with AMD since the steam deck custom APU (although that one was apparently just something originally intended for magic leap before that fell apart), this could be in there + be powerful enough to run standalone VR.

I don't think I'm using x86 for anything anymore. All the PC's in my home are ARM, the phones are ARM, the TV's are ARM and even the webservers I'm running are ARM nowadays.

If AMD releases an APU that is just using off-the-shelf ARM Cortex cores, it will be completely uninteresting and won't matter. Lots of companies have done that. I'd love to see them dedicate an amount of resources to an ARM processor that makes it competitive with their Ryzen x86 line.

Couldn't you switch up the decoder logic and make it a RISC-V chip and just blow away existing competition that isn't quite Pi yet?

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.

> Memory support is another highlight: the chip integrates a 128-bit LPDDR5X-9600 controller and will reportedly include 16 GB of onboard RAM, aligning with current trends in unified memory designs used in ARM SoCs. Additionally, the APU carries AMD’s fourth-generation AI engine, enabling on-device inference tasks

128-bit LPDDR5X-9600 is about 150 GB/s, that's 50% better than an Orin NX. If they can sell these things for less than like $500 then it would be a pretty decent deal for edge inference. 16 GB is ridiculously tiny for the use case though when it's actually more like 15 in practice and the OS and other stuff then takes another two or three, leaving you with like 12 maybe. Hopefully there's a 32 GB model eventually...

I wish both AMD and Intel could push to open x86 design so it doesn't end up being like POWER in 10 - 20 years time. We have OpenPOWER but no body cares any more.

I have an AMD Seattle in a cupboard somewhere. https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2017/06/01/amd-seattle-lemaker-ce...

Wow. This could really be a big deal, especially if it’s more of an openly available product than what Qualcomm has on offer.

For me personally I’d love it if this made it to a framework mainboard. I wouldn’t even mind the soldered memory, I understand the technical tradeoff there.

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.

hello,

imho. (!)

i think this would be great!!

personally i totally understood why AMD gave up on its last attempt - the A1100 opterons - about 10 years ago in favor of the back then new ryzen architecture:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Opteron_processors...

but what i would really like to see: an ARM soc/apu on an "open"*) (!) hardware-platform similar to the existing amd64 pc hardware.

*) "open" as in: i'm able to boot whatever (vanilla) arm64 linux-distribution or other OS i want ...

i have to add: i'm personally offended by the amount of tinkering of the firmware/boot-process which is necessary to get for example the raspberry pi 5 (or 4) to boot vanilla debian/arm64 ... ;)

br, a..z

ps. even if its a bit o.T. in this context, as a reminder a link to a slightly older article about an interview with jim keller about how ISA no longer matters that much ...

"ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter"

* https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

I don't know if the new processors will be better, but they will definitely be AI.

;-P

fingers crossed it'll eventually get a framework board

More speculation?

If it was ordered by Microsoft and paid by Microsoft to be developed, fine.

But, wouldn't it make more sense for amd to go into risc-v at this point of time?

Now imagine people having written Assembly x86/x64 desktop apps or inline in native code.

They will be very happy.

They should move to risc-v instead.

i guess jeff geerling and others have been doing driver testing for them by running AMD GPUs on RPIs :P

It’s exciting to see AMD trying ARM again, competition always brings better chips for everyone.

They could do it if Apple and nVidia didn't buy all the available fab slots.

Long time ago Intel predicted ARM won't be a big deal and they sold XScale to Marvell.

I'm curious what operating system will this run. Linux, Android, Windows?