Microsoft’s Windows on ARM developer kit is out now
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Microsoft has released its Windows Dev Kit 2023 (formerly known as Project Volterra) for general sale.
The device promises a compact all-in-one workstation for natively building, running and testing Windows apps, and faster artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads, thanks to the new Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
It is made possible by Snapdragon’s 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform together with Qualcomm’s Neural Processing SDKensuring maximum performance and bringing Microsoft one step closer to making hybrid compute and AI workflows the norm.
Arm native apps
The Announcement (opens in new tab) follows its first tease at Microsoft Build 2022, where the company outlined its vision for the new development kit, as well as an Arm-native toolchain to keep application development local on a single device.
It is also delivered there. Previews of arm native versions of Visual Studio 2022, the Windows App software development kit (SDK), and the VC++ Runtime are now available, while the .NET Framework 4.8.1 for Arm was released with the Windows 11 2022 update.
In addition, the .NET 7 toolchain, which claims to provide functional parity for ARM over x64 architecture, is now also available in preview, while Microsoft’s Azure virtual machines (VMs) and Arm64EC are now publicly available, allowing development and app tests are possible. now seamless.
Arm64EC (opens in new tab) provides a way to integrate native Arm code with x64 code as part of the same process. A possible use case for this could be to gradually transition x64 apps to Arm architecture, rather than investing time developing solely for one platform.
Visual Studio 2022 on Arm, in monthly previews since July, now supports Desktop workloads, Windows SDK and Windows App SDK components (Win UI), and Web, Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Node.js, and game development workloads.
Coinciding with the launch of the hardware, Microsoft’s Collaborative Tools are now also available on Arm, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365the web browser Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) (opens in new tab) and Microsoft OneDrive.
And to ensure that users never feel the need to part with their dev kits, various solutions for creativity, video conferencing, security and benchmarking have all been ported to Arm devices. There are many names here, such as Adobe, Zoom, Sophos, Cisco, PassMark – and Microsoft claims there are more on the way.
The hardware itself is also exciting. In addition to what was mentioned above, the device has 32 GB LPDDR4x RAM and a 512 GB NVMe SSD fast storage, plus three USB-A, two USB-C ports and a Mini Display port for maximum device compatibility.
We are certainly impressed on paper and we look forward to all the new developments coming to the virtual market on October 26th Arm Dev Summit (opens in new tab).
For now, the Windows Dev Kit 2023 is now available for purchase in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and China.