AMD “Sound Wave” APU to be based on a 3nm process node

Recently, a data mining website that specialises in LinkedIn profiles of employees from semiconductor firms discovered that one of the profiles contains a list of five unreleased AMD codenames. Although most of them were already known, one is new. That's “Sound Wave”.

According to Gamma0burst (via Wccftech), AMD plans to upgrade its APU lineup with the Zen5 microarchitecture, which will supposedly debut sometime in 2024 with Strix Point (Strix A0?) on mainstream laptops. Then, we should get Sarlak (sometimes called Strix Halo), which is expected to be released later this year to rival the Apple M-series chips. After these two, the list shows a second AMD Strix chip named “Strix B0?” which could be referring to Strix Halo, meaning this one and Sarlak are two different chips.

Image credit: Gamma0burst

Another interesting name on the list is Kraken, which, according to the latest reports, will be an 8-core CPU with 4x Zen5 and 4x Zen5c cores and 8x RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. Seeing the specs, it looks to be a good fit for a next generation handheld gaming system.

Moreover, another intriguing detail discovered by Gamm0burst is that Strix, Sarlak, and Kraken will all use chiplet designs, as distinct I/O dies were found for these APUs. That would contradict early reports that claimed that Strix Point was monolithic.

The last and most interesting discovery on this list is Sound Wave. Unfortunately, we still don't know much about this new chip, but it seems it will be based on the 3nm process node, meaning it would probably feature the upcoming Zen 6 core architecture. However, the source has warned that the nodes given by the AMD engineer may be incorrect, and one should only focus on the codename.

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