Microsoft Announces Windows 11 on ARM Devkit
Project Volterra, as explained by Microsoft, is designed to give developers the hardware and software platform to build apps for Windows on ARM. This mini desktop PC is powered by the Snapdragon compute platform. Microsoft has not shared many details about its specs, but it is said to have an announced Snapdragon chipset under the hood. As for the design, the developer kit (pictured in the header image) resembles the Mac Mini in shape and size.
More details will be shared over the next few months. But, Microsoft does reveal that the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) baked into ARM processors will enable developers to “explore many AI scenarios”. The company plans to make it easier for developers to leverage the AI capabilities enabled by the ARM processors by “baking support for NPUs into the end-to-end Windows platform,” as per the official blog post.
That’s not all, though. Microsoft has also announced an ARM-native developer toolchain, so developers can natively build and test their apps on ARM-enabled Windows machines. For this, Microsoft apps like Visual Studio 2022, VS Code, Windows Terminal, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) will soon run natively on ARM-based Windows PCs.
Furthermore, Qualcomm also has a part to play in this development. It has released a “Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit” to support the vision of app developers. The cross-platform app development beyond CPUs, and powered by the NPU and cloud services has been termed the “Hybrid Loop” by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the Build 2022 event.
Finally, if you are looking to get your hands on Project Volterra, there’s bad news for you. We currently don’t know anything about its cost, release date, or other information important to app developers. So stay tuned, as we will share more details about Project Volterra as and when they are available.
