Recently, careful netizens discovered in the shipping list that AMD is developing a system on chip (SoC) based on Arm architecture, codenamed "Sound Wave". Previously, AMD has stated that the Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) does not have natural energy efficiency advantages, and the energy-saving effect mainly depends on packaging and design.
However, the latest exposed information shows that the “Sound Wave” APU has reappeared after being dormant for a period of time. This chip is packaged in BGA 1074 and has a total of 1074 pins. It is specially designed for embedded systems and does not support plug-in replacement. The chip size is 32×27 mm, which is compact and suitable for mobile platforms such as handheld devices and thin and light notebooks. It uses an FF5 slot interface, replacing the FF3 slot used by the previous Valve Steam Deck SoC, with a pin pitch of 0.8 mm.
As an Arm architecture product, "Sound Wave" is expected to adopt a big/little core (big.LITTLE) design. Some models are equipped with 2 performance cores (P-Core) and 4 energy efficiency cores (E-Core). The overall design is a six-core design and equipped with RDNA 3.5 GPU. The high-end version supports up to 4 computing units (CU). This SoC is positioned for low-power applications, with a target power consumption of 10 watts, which fully meets the needs of long-term gaming and battery life. Suppliers can adjust TDP according to needs to meet the performance or energy-saving requirements of different application scenarios.
Currently, there is no clear information on the specific launch time and price of the "Sound Wave" APU, and it remains to be seen whether AMD will apply it to third-party designs. In terms of market competition, as Qualcomm and Nvidia accelerate the layout of the new generation of Arm solutions, the Arm-based SoC battle is heating up.