Leaked AMD "Sound Wave" Arm-based APU Linked to "Microsoft Surface (2026)" Lineup

[T0@st]

Late last month, data miners unearthed a wide variety of unannounced AMD Ryzen processor IPs. A "Sound Wave" product category received less attention, but Team Red's curious codename has reemerged in the middle of May. Thanks to fresh Kepler L2 theorizations, this mysterious mobile APU family has a potential end destination. Leaks from 2024 suggested that company engineers were working on an unusual Arm-based processor branch. AMD is cozily well-versed in all things x86, but an alleged present day diversification—into Arm (x64) territories—has confounded a fair few industry watchdogs.

In a tangential conversation—forking off from speculative "Zen 6" and PlayStation 6 APU chatter—Kepler L2 reckons that Team Red "Sound Wave" chips will be deployed in 2026, possibly within a refreshed Microsoft Surface lineup. Current-gen Arm-based offerings—leveraging Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors—have generated mixed user impressions (press and public alike). Microsoft and Qualcomm's "Windows on Arm" (WoA) platform partnership was elevated earlier on in May (with cheaper options), but troublesome hardware-to-software compatibility issues have reportedly caused some rifts in this relationship. As of last week, evaluators seemed to be poking around with NVIDIA's rumored Arm-based "N1" chip series on Windows. In theory, AMD's futuristic "Sound Wave" designs could do battle with (claimed) Team Green and MediaTek collaborative efforts.



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[ncrs]

AMD is no stranger to ARM since they have a full ARM architectural license. Opteron A1100 from 2016 was an ARMv8 server CPU. The original Zen core was co-developed with an ARM K12 project, according to Mike Clark, Zen Lead Architect via AnandTech:

IC: Alongside Zen we learned about Project Skybridge, the ability to put an x86 SoC and an Arm SoC on the same socket. Do you know how far along the Arm version of Skybridge, we know as K12, was in development before AMD went full bore for Ryzen?

MC: Originally Zen and K12 were, I think, we call them sister projects. They had kind of the same goals, just a different ISA actually hooked up. The core proper was that way, and the L2/L3 hierarchy could be either one. Then of course, in Skybridge, the Data Fabric could be either one. There was a whole team doing the K12, and we did share a lot of things you know, to be efficient, and had a lot of good debates about architecture. Although I've worked on x86 obviously for 28 years, it's just an ISA, and you can build a low-power design or a high-performance out any ISA. I mean, ISA does matter, but it's not the main component - you can change the ISA if you need some special instructions to do stuff, but really the microarchitecture is in a lot of ways independent of the ISA. There are some interesting quirks in the different ISAs, but at the end of the day, it's really about microarchitecture. But really I focused on the Zen side of it all.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

If MS wants the whole "windows on ARM" thing to catch on they REALLY need to get a move on with compatibility and performance. As of now it's still dismal.

 

[AusWolf]

I thought Sound Wave was the codename of Zen 6 mobile.

 

[Cheeseball]

If MS wants the whole "windows on ARM" thing to catch on they REALLY need to get a move on with compatibility and performance. As of now it's still dismal.

Yup this is practically the only way to get Windows on ARM to be more popular. They need to improve their own binary translator so x86 stuff can work well on the ARM ISA. Once they get performance to at least 80% of native, then these Windows on ARM devices would catch on quick.

 

[Denver]

AMD is no stranger to ARM since they have a full ARM architectural license. Opteron A1100 from 2016 was an ARMv8 server CPU. The original Zen core was co-developed with an ARM K12 project, according to Mike Clark, Zen Lead Architect via AnandTech:

This quote also answers why an ARM product from AMD doesn't make sense.

 

[wNotyarD]

If MS wants the whole "windows on ARM" thing to catch on they REALLY need to get a move on with compatibility and performance. As of now it's still dismal.

I know the latest Prism update (which brings some AVX emulation) is still only in the most bleeding edge branch of the Insider program. For everything else (explictly nothing specialized computing), I don't have much to complain about the X1E performance, it's way more agile than the i5 I used before.

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

I thought Sound Wave was the codename of Zen 6 mobile.

Someone provided wrong info.

Soundwave has been rumored for a while now and it was always an Arm based chip.

This quote also answers why an ARM product from AMD doesn't make sense.

On the contrary, makes perfect sense.

AMD is one of the few companies that others can contract for custom CPU, SOC and even GPUs without the third parties being afraid of stupid backstabbing, like how Ngreedia did to pretty much everyone that dared working with them.

So far, only Nintendo has escaped the prodigal Ngreedia knife in the back.

So whoever needs anything custom, they know that AMD can provide it.

 

[Endeavour]

If MS wants the whole "windows on ARM" thing to catch on they REALLY need to get a move on with compatibility and performance. As of now it's still dismal.

It's not Microsoft's fault only. For example, a lot of software that uses OpenGL doesn't work on current ARM Surface Laptops because the OpenGL drivers from Qualcomm are really bad, offering only basic 2.1 support. And who can blame them? OpenGL is already obsolete, despite being present in a ton of software. It's a showstopper for a lot of people.

 

[Wirko]

AMD is no stranger to ARM since they have a full ARM architectural license.

They have the experience - if it hasn't dispersed. And they have the architectural license - but for which architecture? They need it for ARMv9.2 or whatever is the most current, and I doubt that an architectural license covers everything and forever. But nevermind, I think they're still in a good position to develop a capable client processor on Arm.

I also speculated in these forums long ago that a mixed-architecture processor would be possible, containing a few powerful x86-86 cores and a few Arm crores. Mike Clark's notes even make an impression it would be *easy* (of course it wouldn't be easy). If anyone, AMD can make a usable mess out of that.

W

Post in thread 'AMD Zen 5 "Strix Point" Processors Rumored To Feature big.LITTLE Core Design'

Apr 28, 2021

Why would you even want to have two cluster with entirely different ISAs ?

In 2021: for no reason at all
In 2024: it's an interesting question. The world of computing may become much more heterogeneus by then, with Arm more prominent in laptops and with more use cases that require running both x86 and Arm applications at the same time. That can be done either by means of fat binaries, translation (Arm running x86 code as well as x86 running Arm code), or processors with both kinds of cores.

• Wirko

 

[ncrs]

They have the experience - if it hasn't dispersed. And they have the architectural license - but for which architecture? They need it for ARMv9.2 or whatever is the most current, and I doubt that an architectural license covers everything and forever. But nevermind, I think they're still in a good position to develop a capable client processor on Arm.

I'm sure that if this rumor is true and it's Microsoft being the client then licensing will be in order

I also speculated in these forums long ago that a mixed-architecture processor would be possible, containing a few powerful x86-86 cores and a few Arm crores. Mike Clark's notes even make an impression it would be *easy* (of course it wouldn't be easy). If anyone, AMD can make a usable mess out of that.

W

Post in thread 'AMD Zen 5 "Strix Point" Processors Rumored To Feature big.LITTLE Core Design'

Apr 28, 2021

Why would you even want to have two cluster with entirely different ISAs ?

In 2021: for no reason at all
In 2024: it's an interesting question. The world of computing may become much more heterogeneus by then, with Arm more prominent in laptops and with more use cases that require running both x86 and Arm applications at the same time. That can be done either by means of fat binaries, translation (Arm running x86 code as well as x86 running Arm code), or processors with both kinds of cores.

• Wirko

I find it unlikely that a mixed-architecture CPU, as in having multiple architectures running simultaneously in one OS, is going to be viable simply due to the complexities of the OS needing to support it, not to mention software itself.
We can't even get multiple levels of the same architecture running at the same time, for example Alder Lake P-cores with AVX-512 and E-cores without. Which would be a simpler proposition than ARM+x86.

 

[cal5582]

If MS wants the whole "windows on ARM" thing to catch on they REALLY need to get a move on with compatibility and performance. As of now it's still dismal.

i dont get the need for it. the reason people choose microsoft in the first place is backwards compatibility and cost. plenty of places would go full tilt apple on the client side if they didnt need some old program to run on some overly expensive cnc machine that only runs with xp drivers offline.

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

I find it unlikely that a mixed-architecture CPU

Kind of agree but at the same time, I wonder if having one or two x86 cores in a ARM cluster can be utilized as some kind of accelerator in the same way that Apple does for the media engines they include in their SOC.

 

[ncrs]

Kind of agree but at the same time, I wonder if having one or two x86 cores in a ARM cluster can be utilized as some kind of accelerator in the same way that Apple does for the media engines they include in their SOC.

It happened in the past, not as integrated as being on one SoC, but for example Sun Microsystems workstations could have been equipped with an expansion card called SunPCi containing basically a whole PC. There were integrations in SunOS/Solaris for ease of use. Performance was way better than any attempt at emulation, at least back then, since it's native execution on real hardware. There's a few videos on youtube about them if you're interested.

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

It happened in the past, not as integrated as being on one SoC, but for example Sun Microsystems workstations could have been equipped with an expansion card called SunPCi containing basically a whole PC. There were integrations in SunOS/Solaris for ease of use. Performance was way better than any attempt at emulation, at least back then, since it's native execution on real hardware. There's a few videos on youtube about them if you're interested.

I remember those!

So given the advances in tech, such an approach is definitely possible.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

i dont get the need for it.

This guy answered it for you:

the reason people choose microsoft in the first place is backwards compatibility and cost. plenty of places would go full tilt apple on the client side if they didnt need some old program to run on some overly expensive cnc machine that only runs with xp drivers offline.

without backwards compatibility MS will never see solid Windows on ARM production.

Short of apple figuring out how to do Active Directory they'll not replace Windows in corporate environments.

It's not Microsoft's fault only. For example, a lot of software that uses OpenGL doesn't work on current ARM Surface Laptops because the OpenGL drivers from Qualcomm are really bad, offering only basic 2.1 support. And who can blame them? OpenGL is already obsolete, despite being present in a ton of software. It's a showstopper for a lot of people.

This is true, but if I was MS and qualcomm refused to update drivers to support APIs I would refuse to allow them any further exclusivity and look elsewhere.

 

[Endeavour]

This is true, but if I was MS and qualcomm refused to update drivers to support APIs I would refuse to allow them any further exclusivity and look elsewhere.

We already have a lot of rumors about ARM processors from AMD and from Mediatek+NVIDIA, so things could get a lot more interesting soon.

 

[cal5582]

This guy answered it for you:

without backwards compatibility MS will never see solid Windows on ARM production.

Short of apple figuring out how to do Active Directory they'll not replace Windows in corporate environments.


This is true, but if I was MS and qualcomm refused to update drivers to support APIs I would refuse to allow them any further exclusivity and look elsewhere.

TBH i think the reason for the corporate push to arm, is probably vendor lock-in more than anything to do with low power usage. microsoft has been trying to force a walled garden approach since the windows phone days, theyve tried it several times with trying to depreciate win32 apps and force uwp, then there was windows10x where the entire push was to lock down the os.

 

[remixedcat]

ARM is very good cuz it has more registers than x86 64 so this is awesome that AMD is gonna have ARM CPUs

They have the experience - if it hasn't dispersed. And they have the architectural license - but for which architecture? They need it for ARMv9.2 or whatever is the most current, and I doubt that an architectural license covers everything and forever. But nevermind, I think they're still in a good position to develop a capable client processor on Arm.

I also speculated in these forums long ago that a mixed-architecture processor would be possible, containing a few powerful x86-86 cores and a few Arm crores. Mike Clark's notes even make an impression it would be *easy* (of course it wouldn't be easy). If anyone, AMD can make a usable mess out of that.

W

Post in thread 'AMD Zen 5 "Strix Point" Processors Rumored To Feature big.LITTLE Core Design'

Apr 28, 2021

Why would you even want to have two cluster with entirely different ISAs ?

In 2021: for no reason at all
In 2024: it's an interesting question. The world of computing may become much more heterogeneus by then, with Arm more prominent in laptops and with more use cases that require running both x86 and Arm applications at the same time. That can be done either by means of fat binaries, translation (Arm running x86 code as well as x86 running Arm code), or processors with both kinds of cores.

• Wirko

Mixed processor architecture won't work.
ARM and x86 are compiled completely differently