Microsoft showed off a dedicated Windows for ARM devkit at its Build conference. It must encourage developers to adopt this new platform for their applications.
For a good decade now, Microsoft has been trying to somehow adopt the ARM ecosystem with Windows. It started with Windows RT, then attempts evolved into Windows for ARM. Unfortunately, it never got to the point where you could really recommend an ARM product with Windows. However, the platform is full of promises, and Apple was able to realize them very quickly by adopting ARM in 2020.
A development kit made in Surface
Unlike Apple, Microsoft hasn’t made ARM its only future. The difference may come from there. Apple has publicly announced that within a few months, all of its devices will run on Apple Silicon (ARM) instead of an Intel chip. It was therefore necessary for the developers to adopt this novelty at a forced march. This notably happened through the launch of a development kit in the summer of 2020. It was a Mac Mini with an Apple A12Z chip. During build 2022, Microsoft, in turn, presented a first development kit for the ARM version of Windows. It is called Project Volterra and was designed by engineers from the Surface team. That kind of makes it Microsoft’s first desktop PC.
Even Project Volterra’s design is reminiscent of Apple’s approach with the Mac Mini. This is also a small, fairly compact desktop PC. Microsoft indicates that the design is thought to allow several to be stacked, which can be practical for a developer looking to test several configurations at the same time.
Inside, there is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8CX Gen 3 chip, the latest to provide a better level of performance. In its communication, Microsoft emphasizes the integration of the NPU, Neural Processing Unitto speed up AI-related calculations.
Source: Microsoft
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft did not give a detailed specifications sheet, but we can see in the presentation video that the device includes two USB-C ports on one edge, and a wider connection on another edge. The latter offers a power port, an RJ45 port, a miniDisplayPort and three USB Type-A ports. The firm did not give details on the release or price of this development kit.
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A suite of native tools for ARM
For developers, Microsoft took the opportunity to announce or confirm the compatibility of a whole suite of tools natively under ARM:
- Visual Studio 2022
- Visual StudioCode
- Visual C++
- Modern .NET 6 and Java
- Classic .NET Framework
- windows-terminal
- Windows Subsystem for Linux
- Windows Subsystem for Android
Hopefully these new efforts from Microsoft will finally make Windows for ARM more compelling. Apple will not hesitate to move forward, and very quickly.
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