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Microsoft announces a brand-new Arm-powered desktop PC and Arm-native dev tools
At its Build developer conference Tuesday, Microsoft made a few announcements aimed at bolstering Windows on Arm. The first is Project Volterra, a Microsoft-branded mini-desktop computer powered by an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. More relevant for developers who already have Arm hardware, Volterra will be accompanied by a fully Arm-native suite of developer tools.
According to Microsoft's blog post, the company will be releasing ARM-native versions of Visual Studio 2022 and VSCode, Visual C++, Modern .NET 6, the classic .NET framework, Windows Terminal, and both the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android. Arm-native versions of these apps will allow developers to run them without the performance penalty associated with translating x86 code to run on Arm devices—especially helpful given that Arm Windows devices usually don't have much performance to spare.
[...] As for the Volterra hardware, what we know is that it's running a Qualcomm SoC with a built-in neural processing unit (NPU), "best-in-class AI computing capacity," and support for Qualcomm's Neural Processing SDK. Microsoft is pushing it as a solution for testing AI and machine-learning apps, although depending on the other specs it could also be a good general-purpose development box for Windows on Arm apps.
While Microsoft remains quiet on what chipset powers Project Volterra, WinFuture asserts that it is the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3, which contains four ARM Cortex-X1 cores running at 2.99 GHz and an additional four Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz.
[...] Moreover, Microsoft claims that Project Volterra is stackable, theoretically allowing developers to combine two or more Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 chipsets together.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @06:03AM (2 children)
...they can legally physically prevent wiping and installation of another OS on the system if it's ARM based, so forget buying an ARM desktop or laptop made for Windows so you can run Linux or BSD on it. That's the whole reason they're pushing this IMO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @11:01AM (1 child)
no it's to join the "planned obsolescence" game.
the "drivers" ofc need to remain closed-source for this to happen and a new "OS feature" only works on newer harware ... thus claiming everybody bought the new arm and it was not cost effective to support the previous arm ... thus turning a 3 year old.device into a NSA /foreign threat actor spring board -or- landfill material.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @02:35PM
whynotboth.gif