Implementing heterogenous wavefronts on a graphics processing unit (GPU) is disclosed. A schedule assigns heterogeneous wavefronts for execution on a compute unit of a processing device. The heterogeneous wavefronts include different types of wavefronts such as vector compute wavefronts service-level wavefronts that vary in resource requirements and instruction sets. As one example, heterogenous wavefronts may include scalar wavefronts and vector compute wavefronts that execute on scalar units and vector units, respectively. Distinct sets of instructions are executed for the heterogenous wavefronts on the compute unit. Heterogenous wavefronts are processed in the same pipeline of the processing device.