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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, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 27 2022, @07:31AM (1 child)
One thing to note is that the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 [soylentnews.org] is packing 4 Cortex-X cores. We haven't seen more than 2 in a smartphone. They aren't fundamentally that different from Cortex-A78, but it is clearly a desktop/laptop-oriented SoC.
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and supposedly they will introduce Nuvia-developed designs that actually have a chance of taking on Apple Silicon and winning. But you'll have to wait until around 2024 [tomshardware.com] for anything to materialize.
Samsung is rumored [slashdot.org] to attempt its own custom silicon again to take on Apple, around 2025. They are currently partnering with AMD on graphics and you could expect that to continue.
Linux? Well, let's hope one of these companies takes it seriously.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @05:16PM
Don't forget Microsoft requires ARM system manufacturers to not permit disabling of "secure boot". If they also do not allow you to enroll your own keys, you will be forced to use the mainstream linux distribution official kernels and bootloaders that have been signed by Microsoft. Last I checked none of the BSDs were signed by MS either.
And, Qualcomm has a history. They have repeatedly said FU to upstreaming drivers or even providing source for their drivers. Qualcomm is just an alternate spelling for,
"binary blobs". I'm not sure how that will work for a distro + secure boot?
Asahi Linux is coming along well (and Freebsd has been using what the Asahi Linux reverse engineering team discovers to add support in Freebsd too). Apple hardware will likely end up better supported by Linux and *BSD than this WinArm junk.
https://asahilinux.org/about/ [asahilinux.org]