I don't think AMD had the money to properly execute on both Zen and this K12 ARM chip. So they chose the more safer bet of Zen which seems to have worked out really well for them.

Funny how some of his projects got cancelled like K12 at AMD or Royal Core at INTC and people always act like that was terrible decision, yet AMD is up like 100x on stock market and INTC... times gonna tell

He was probably right from a technical perspective. Maybe not from a business one.

I believe Jim Keller is now working on RISC-V which could take the server market by storm in the next 5 years or so.

There are already RISC-V server offerings:

https://labs.scaleway.com/en/em-rv1/

AMD was being pummeled by Intel during the time Jim was there and was only the giant we know today when Jim left. AMD did this, mostly, by x64 server market. So AMD did what it could to get around intel's and apple's monopolies. Intel on the server end came in at a higher price, and often worse performance or more power usage, or both. I'm not sure who AMD would have sold ARM to in 2010's. Apple didnt want their product and made their own, cell phone companies were cozy with the established ARM vendors, MS wouldnt launch an actual ARM laptop for years, data centers didn't want it, etc.

Look at intel's various arm or embedded offerings it keep canceling. It can't find buyers. Qualcomm and Samsung other vendors just keep eating up sales in ARM.

Now I imagine AMD sees ARM servers as the future and wants to make sure not to be left behind, on top of ARM desktop/laptop and further embedded.

I think this mostly a sign the world is now moving away from the old x86/64 system that ruled technology for so long. AMD is needs to stay competitive here.

He also left AMD 10-years ago (2015).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)

It is easy to talk after the fact. The giant market opener for ARMs was Apple, many times in business it is better to he a follower once a big market arises.

From the name you'd expect a simple sound card, but look deeper and there is more than meets the eye [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundwave_(Transformers)

I was hoping it'd be a very cool soundcard, perhaps with unlimited General Midi channels.

Not sure what their intention is of course, but nowadays there is A LOT of Cortexes in various sound gear. Plenty in things like Eurorack but also outboard equipment like the Eventide H9000 etc.

A common trend in audio systems is that the market cap is too small for economies of scale when it comes to commodity parts like processors. There are a handful of audio-specific chips that are common but processors are not one of them (any more).

Perhaps it is named after the Decepticon?

I mean, "Coffee Lake" does not make much sense either.

With the caveat that ARM isn't a industry standard like PC has become, thus while propritary OSes can thrive, FOSS has a much higher challenge other than OEM specific distros or downstream forks.

Stuff like this, https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Microsoft-Corporation/dp/15723171...

Are ARM processors inherently power efficient? I doubt.

Performance per watt is increasing due to the lithography.

Also, Devon’s paradox.

ISA is not that relevant, it is all about what you want to achieve with your CPU

Meh, performance-per-watt is not what everybody wants. I only want it in that it affords more raw performance by allowing more watts to be pumped through it without thermal overload. But if that can't actually happen then I'm still more interested in x86. Sure the lights dim when I turn my PC on, but I want the performance.

How is running desktop Linux on these?

I think Amlogic, Mediatek and Qualcomm all have SoC which are significantly better than the Tegra for this use case. It’s just that the market barely exists as most consumers use their tv directly so no one really wants to make a media box anymore.

My thoughts exactly! Although I may end up getting some Mini M1/M2 variant with Asahi Linux instead

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.

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?

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.

> 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?

cough gaming device

It could just be a play to make sure there's a second source to qualcomm

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.

ampere?

Im too dumb to know why?

Why have both to run native arm64 code? Nearly anything you'd want is cross compiled/compilable (save some macOS stuff but that's more than just CPU architecture).

My understanding is that ARM chips can be more efficient? Hence them being used in phones etc.

I guess it would let you run android stuff "natively"?

Or perhaps you imagine running Blender in x64 mode and discord in the low wattage ARM chip?

Rosetta shows translation works. Why complicate the os with multiple ISA?

risc-v would have been so much cooler.

> "ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter"

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

Some people, for some strange reason, want to endlessly relitigate the old 1980'ies RISC vs CISC flamewars. Jim Kellers interview above is a good antidote for that. Yes, RISC vs CISC matters for something like a simple in-order core you might see in embedded systems. For a big OoO core, much less so.

That doesn't mean you'd end up with x86 if you'd design a clean sheet 'best practices' ISA today. Probably it would indeed look something like aarch64 or RISC-V. So certainly in that sense RISC won. But the win isn't so overwhelming that it overcomes the value of the x86 software ecosystem in the markets where x86 plays.

I always wonder why nobody have never released a framework mainboard with rockchip. There is even one with a - very - slow RISC-V for OS developer FFS.

there are two predominant architectures right now (right or wrong), amd64 and arm64. Why the F would amd invest in risc when their gpus are well above intel in specs and explain the biz market approach for risc...

> The chip is expected to power future Microsoft Surface products scheduled for release in 2026.

It looks like it is intended to run Windows Arm.

It's only a big deal because of x86 licensing.

That will probably happen eventually, but right now RISC-V only has the hp for embedded or peripheral uses. It will continue to nip at ARM’s heels for the next 5-10 years.