AMD is expanding its processor portfolio beyond the x86 architecture with its first ARM-based APU, internally known as “Sound Wave.” The chip’s existence was uncovered through customs import records, confirming several details about its design and purpose. Built with a BGA-1074 package measuring 32 mm × 27 mm, the processor fits within standard mobile SoC dimensions, making it suitable for thin and light computing platforms. It employs a 0.8 mm pitch and FF5 interface, replacing the FF3 socket previously used in Valve’s Steam handheld devices, further hinting at a new generation of compact AMD-powered hardware.
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It only makes sense for AMD to enter the market for ARM SoCs, as it’s a whole section of the processor market they’re not tapping into. Even if they don’t manage to compete with the best ARM processors out there, they can still serve the mid and lower end just fine.
And it looks like American companies are leaving the entire RISV-C field to Chinese ones.
Yes, ARM is great, and currently offers the best power efficiency as an ISA without compromising performance. However it is still a closed system. (More closed to than x86, ironically)
While, StarFive, SiFive, and others are producing SoCs used by Banana, or Milk to produce mini (Raspberry Pi form factor) or desktop (mini-ITX) sized boards.
Sorry for jumping in like this, but my first thought was “this is great, but where is more diversity?”
Tenstorrent Ascalon — RVA23 – already supported in GCC and Clang
https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/riscvsummit2025/e2/Unleash%20your%20RISC-V%20Future%20with%20Tenstorrent%E2%80%99s%20High%20Performance%20Ascalon%20RISC-V%20Processor%20-%20Now%20Available!%20-%20Troy%20Jones%2C%20Tenstorrent.pdf
But yes, China is doing more…
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/05/china_alibaba_risc_v_c930/
https://www.techpowerup.com/335026/chinas-rivai-technologies-introduces-lingyu-risc-v-server-processor
https://riscv.org/blog/three-high-performance-risc-v-processors-to-watch-in-h2-2025-ultrarisc-ur-dp1000-zhihe-a210-and-spacemit-k3/
LeFantome,
Thanks, I did not know about them. It is nice to have some domestic interest.
But apparently there are no current boards we can try, and Chinese manufacturers are leading the way to adopt them 🙂
https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1l4f90z/when_are_we_likely_to_actually_see_rva23/
sukru,
Diversity has never been the point, I believe. Money is. I believe that RISC-V is kept open just because there’s the only way newcomers (Chinese ones mostly) can make money and can leap forward uncumbered by patents and licensing, which is important if they ever aim to seriously compete outside the Chinese domestic market.
We’ve had diversity in the past. At home, I have 2x PA-RISC machines, 2x PowerPC machines, 3 ARM devices operating like a normal computer (running Linux, doing compuntery stuff rather than phone stuff), a MIPS machine, a few amd64 machines. And yet? Now the “serious” market is reduced to amd64 and ARM. It just stopped becoming economically feasible to keep maintaining multiple architectures when performance started being dependent much more on manufacturing process rather than how smart your ISA is.
I find it really hard to see super awesome competitive RISC-V devices unless there’s a strong market incentive for anyone to put RISC-V devices of serious performance and the big industrly players to then start porting money-making software for it.
I’m here for it. The less dependent the world is on Intel and Qualcomm in this space, the better off we all are. I’m honestly surprised AMD waited this long to enter the field.
Competing with Qualcomm, Samsung and now Apple ain’t easy feat. AMD had first to defeat first on the x86 ground before exploring new horizons and fight new quests. On the GPU side though, Nvidia is still strong opponent.
Qualcomm and MediaTek are probably the two real competitors.
I haven’t seen a Samsung Exynos design around in a while (US), which is surprising. I thought they would be a big Arm player by now in the SBC and desktop spaces.
Apple is Apple. They aren’t selling their procs to others, and AMD isn’t selling their procs to Apple.
AMD isn’t taking out Nvidia, but they do have valuable graphics tech in the IoT space. Nvidia seems to be leaving that space, or at least they don’t feel the need to update Tegra.
Will it boot mainline Linux? I’m getting tired of closed systems.
Much higher chance of having linux support coming from AMD, this isn’t because AMD is inherently more altruistic than Qualcomm or Apple, but because the graphics portion is RDNA 3.5 which already has Linux support. I can see AMD having some strong push for Linux support to be able to sell this in Steamdeck type devices to expand the market viability.
Indeed. AMD has a better corporate culture around upstreaming support for their chips.
Apple doesn’t have to think about anyone aside from Apple, and Qualcomm hates their customers.
Does it? AMD is nowadays dominant in the x86 market, which will be around for quite a while, even as WoA becomes more popular and mainstream (In particular, servers are still big – ARM servers only make sense in hyperscale right now. As is gaming.). In the ARM market, they’d be competing against several companies, like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Mediatek, etc. who have carved out various niches and market segments to themselves. The Radeon IP isn’t much a useful differentiator there, as Samsung is proving.
@DefineDecision
> the x86 market, which will be around for quite a while
Agreed
> ARM servers only make sense in hyperscale right now. As is gaming
I must misunderstand you. ARM is so compelling that all the cloud companies are making their own ARM silicon. AWS says that 90% of their EC2 (virtual machine) customers use Graviton (AWS ARM silicon).
For this in-house projects, I think that RISC-V makes even more sense and we should start to see that over the next 12-24 months.
But for AMD, who has to sell to customers, ARM makes the most sense right now.
LeFantome,
Yes, many ARM cores are not directly accessible to end users, but are ubiquitous everywhere. Not only cloud, every smart devices, switches, Internet infrastructure, and many other “below surface” places use ARM.
Still… yes, RISC-V would offer more benefits, especially when ARM ownership itself is still not fully decided. (Did SoftBank finally find a buyer)?
The 5-10W range is where AMD currently isn’t very strong. The Intel N150, N250, and, lesser, N355 kind of run this segment. This could be a pretty good fit if AMD is going to use the off the shelf Arm cores then add their graphics, network, and special sauce.
I’m also curious to know if MS is blaming Qualcomm for the failure of Windows Arm, which is probably fair.
It’s late 2025. This was probably something they were playing around with. Maybe for a game console, like the Xbox, but this sounds like an experiment. AMD has had an Arm license for a while, and they have been shipping Arm cores for their security processor.
It wold be neat to see, especially if AMD upstreams it’s Arm offering like its x86 offerings. People are kind of annoyed about how little support the current Arm vendors offer, and Arm needs better vendor support if it wants to make solid gains against x86. Support in a major distro like Debian or Fedora on day of launch would be a solid reason to pick these chips.