30 ms·

Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

• alexellisuk 4y ago
  Does Linux work on it? No, not yet. It may need some custom firmware like you see in the instructions for the Surface. Support for the Qualcomm chip did land in v6.0 of the Kernel - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b6a6535b339776d32fa515a18a93b1b317e9b063 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b6a6535b339776d32fa... I just had mine arrive today, which I wanted to enroll as an ARM64 build agent (with Firecracker) for self-actuated ( https://docs.actuated.dev https://docs.actuated.dev ) - this does actually work with Asahi Linux and the Mac Mini M1, but that was double the price for half the RAM. So far, it's not looking good, with Ubuntu Server 22.04 and 22.10 both crashing after the Grub menu. I'm sharing progress here: https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1585562359254421504?s=20&t=NSy-dBydIZdGCx9tJMyarw https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1585562359254421504?s...
• alexellisuk 4y ago
  I've written up my findings with trying to getting Linux working on the new Dev Kit - https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/ https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bitwize 4y ago
  All that effort and the best ARM Windows development machine is still "a VM on an Apple Silicon Mac".
  • lordleft 4y ago
    Is this actually true? How is Visual Studio in parallels or crossover?
    • thesquib 4y ago
      Not great
    • gjsman-1000 4y ago
      Technically, yes. If you look at the benchmarks, a VM of Windows on an M1 (base model) is significantly faster than both the SQ1 / 8cx Gen 1 and SQ2 / 8cx Gen 2 processors Microsoft included with the Surface Pro X (by like, 30%, it's not even close), though how it compares to 8cx Gen 3 / SQ3 is unknown. However, considering we're on M2 by now, and that we now have M1 Pro and M1 Ultra models as well... egh...
      • postalrat 4y ago
        32gb on an m2 is probably going to cost you around $3000. I don't think 32gb on m1 is even possible.
        • gjsman-1000 4y ago
          Sure - if you need all 32GB for development work, it is a great deal. But, with a processor slower than a midrange modern Intel laptop, good luck using it to its full extent without feeling quite slow. So slow you might almost prefer a 16GB M1 Mac mini with swap for the rest despite the VM. Plus, if you read Microsoft documentation on Windows on ARM so far, Microsoft doesn't actually expect you to use an IDE on these machines - but rather run your code remotely on them. You'll be a lot happier with your IDE running on a more powerful machine. Of course, if you do that, the lack of a GPU on the M1 for a Windows on ARM VM becomes not really an issue.
          • lostmsu 4y ago
            VS .NET workload is advertised to be working already.
          • postalrat 4y ago
            16gb is the near the cutoff that I need to run all the app/containers/etc I need. If I don't have enough memory everything comes to an abrupt crawl. When that happens it doesn't matter what CPU I have, things are nearly locked up.
  • postalrat 4y ago
    How much development experience targeting windows on arm do you have?
    • faeriechangling 4y ago
      I’ve developed on WoA plenty and it’s my primary Windows dev platform, but targeting it? Lol. I spin up an Azure VM for testing. Any business which might have made use of this to take advantage of things like ARM devices being cheaper/more available than x86 devices (you literally can’t find an x86 tablet worth using for less than $400) long since ported to Android. Microsoft sort of missed the boat with ARM. Every time I see those little android based terminals littered around small businesses I think “man this sure is a business Microsoft lost for no real reason” I wish Microsoft would support the WoA use case people could actually take advantage of. Using windows in a Mac VM. That would be by far the most effective way to get people to develop for the platform, not this product.
  • mappu 4y ago
    My understanding is that it's not possible to legally get a license for Windows in that case, as there's no SKU for it. Has that changed? Otherwise it's nonviable at $DAYJOB,
    • layer8 4y ago
      What prevents you from using an existing not-hardware-bound license? Enterprise volume licenses should also work.
• smoldesu 4y ago
  How is Snapdragon 8cx support on Linux? I recall seeing some basic dotfiles for the ARM Thinkpad when it hit shelves, but I haven't seen anything else. Is there a good chance it would run OOB on a recent kernel with this devkit?
  • btdmaster 4y ago
    Given https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm, it should already work if you run something rolling release or similar that has reached 5.20. (Otherwise, waiting for 6.1 is probably simplest.)
• gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I have mixed feelings about how successful this will be. The 32GB of RAM is really cool for the price - but 8cx Gen 3 is still no M1. It's still significantly slower than an 11th Gen laptop Core i5. Probably not super fun to develop on, even if serviceable - but considering nobody has cared about Windows on ARM to this point, why would you spend $599 to suddenly care about it, when WoA has far less than 1% of Windows PC marketshare? Because Microsoft says it's the future? Microsoft is the worst at these promises. That's what they said about Windows 8, then Windows RT, the Windows Phone, the Windows Phone 8 platform, Windows 10 Mobile, UWP in General, the Windows Store, the relaunched Windows Store, Windows on ARM years ago, Project Reunion with XAML islands, Windows 10 S, Windows 10 X, Desktop Converter Bridge, the iOS Converter Bridge... I suppose they kept their promises with DirectX and that kind of thing. Right now, developer apathy for Windows is nearly insurmountable, and has been for the last decade, and Microsoft's constant changing of directions does not instill confidence. https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-apple-3068879/ https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-...
  • lostmsu 4y ago
    Windows Store and Desktop Bridge work though. You are right about everything else.
    • gjsman-1000 4y ago
      Yes... and no. The Windows Store works way better now than it used to, back in 2015. Now it's finally serviceable, but it's still loaded with junk that makes the iOS App Store look well-maintained. Discoverability is still poor (better than it used to be), and the number of people actually using it also remains low. So... it works, but it was hardly the future of app distribution on Windows. As for the Desktop Converter, it's in the same boat. For the first few years, all it was, was a pile of PowerShell scripts. No GUI, mediocre documentation, run a pile of scripts to package your app for a Store almost nobody uses. Also the command to package the app requires Windows 10 Pro and, like, 30 command-line arguments that had to be perfect in order to work. Now it has a GUI, and more people use the Store than before, but the Store has abandoned the need to use it and now allows just directly downloading unpackaged Exes, rendering it mostly pointless.
• IceWreck 4y ago
  I want to install Linux on one of these and use it as a low power consumption home server.
  • piperswe 4y ago
    Same here - with 32GB of RAM I could easily replace my main home server (which runs NixOS, so I can easily just rebuild the system for aarch64). I wonder how quickly people will get Linux running on these...
    • whalesalad 4y ago
      The M1 can run Asahi Linux, which I imagine is going to outperform this. https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-apple-3068879/ https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-...
      • radicaldreamer 4y ago
        Exactly, this is priced very similarly to the Mac Mini with M1 (soon to be updated to use an M2) and can already run Linux fairly well.
        • dihydro 4y ago
          Mac Mini has no option for 32GB of RAM, and with 512GB of SSD storage is $899. How is that similar in price to $599?
          • Tomte 4y ago
            There are two nines. Pretty similar, I'd say.
            • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
              Performing a substring comparison on integers isn't a useful operation.
• nick88msn 4y ago
  "Microsoft tells Windows Central that the Windows Dev Kit 2023 is exclusive to Windows 11, with no official support for running other operating systems such as Linux or even Windows 10 on ARM. The product is designed for developers looking to optimize their apps for ARM on top of Windows 11."
  • xd1936 4y ago
    The word _official_ is italicized[1], and the words "the product is _designed for_" means there may be hope that this is possible. 1. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/project-volterra-launches-today-as-the-windows-dev-kit-2023-with-32gb-ram-and-costs-less-than-a-mac-mini https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/proj...
    • my123 4y ago
      UEFI Secure Boot can be disabled or put in a custom configuration on all arm64 Windows devices, including Windows Dev Kit 2023.
      • smoldesu 4y ago
        And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us!
  • gw99 4y ago
    Realistically you have to ask how many people is that now? I have never seen an ARM windows machine in the wild. In fact I barely even see any windows 11 machines.
    • zeusk 4y ago
      Surface Pro X had some traction, but they share the chassis with Surface Pro 7 and 8 so you wouldn't be able to tell even if you passed by one.
      • 4y ago
• ramesh31 4y ago
  Could this be the harbinger of a return to Windows Phone? The world sorely needs an alternative to the mobile OS duopoly.
  • IndigoIncognito 4y ago
    I'd argue that Microsoft entering the mobile OS market is worse than having a duopoly
    • radicaldreamer 4y ago
      Why?
    • ramesh31 4y ago
      >I'd argue that Microsoft entering the mobile OS market is worse than having a duopoly We need something. I’ve lost all faith in the hardware direction of iPhone. The 14 Pro (let alone Pro Max) is an absurd monstrosity. And Google clearly has no interest in innovation beyond copying Apple.
      • imwillofficial 4y ago
        How do you mean? Im curious as to your thoughts
        • ramesh31 4y ago
          >How do you mean? Im curious as to your thoughts They've lost any sense of maintaining a cohesive design, or keeping things sleek and convenient. Performance has plateaued to a level of diminishing returns, so the only way they can get people to buy a new phone every year since iPhone 7 is to say "hey we put a bigger camera on it". Product ran free with that mandate, and now we have this abomination: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/trevor-raab-iphone-14-pro-0086-1663180196.jpg https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/trevor-raab-ipho... I have this recurring fantasy of an alternate history timeline where Steve Jobs never died, and when an engineer brought him the first iPhone 7 prototype, he held it in his hand, flipped it over, felt the camera bump, and said "You're fired. Get rid of the bump". I just refuse to believe he would have allowed this to happen, and I refuse to believe that we can't have good cameras without bumps.
• klodolph 4y ago
  It makes sense. The Mac Mini is what you get if you want to make a Mac or iOS app, but you want to keep your Windows or Linux system for daily use.
  • pell 4y ago
    Are you sure? I don't want to go the anecdote route here but I know plenty of people who use Mac minis as daily driver desktop machines.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
      There's no conflict? It's a good daily driver for some, and a good second machine for others.
    • klodolph 4y ago
      Yes, I’m pretty sure that the Mac Mini is good as a machine for developing Mac and iOS applications. I have myself used it for this purpose in the past, and it worked very well.
  • dijit 4y ago
    There's a lot more use-cases though, of both systems. If you want a "good" small computer and you already have a screen (or want to buy cheap ones) then these systems are fantastic. Performance is completely fine for moderate-to-heavy workloads (assuming the heavy workloads are bursty) for the Mac mini, and hopefully this. Both systems are what you would get if you didn't need a display or keyboard already, they're desktop replacements with a small footprint, and fantastic for the majority of computer workloads including a lot of development ones.
  • TwoNineA 4y ago
    What's wrong with using a Mac Mini as a daily driver?
    • klodolph 4y ago
      I think you may be responding to something I didn’t write :-)
• thom_ 4y ago
  They should give them away. I’d never spend $600 on any kind of windows product. Maybe we can install linux on it? But you’d have to be smoking crack not to buy a mac mini m1. It’s the best computer I ever used hands down
  • imwillofficial 4y ago
    I mean crack, or a specific use case that isn't Mac bound like some kinds of development. But probably crack
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    if you don't want to spend money on it, just dont buy one. It's ok for something to be made for people who aren't you.
  • swarnie 4y ago
    Can a mac mini m1 run Windows?
    • dottedmag 4y ago
      Yes, in Parallels.
    • TillE 4y ago
      Virtualized, yes. For most purposes, an M1/M2 Mac is an excellent platform for developing stuff for Windows ARM64.
    • nottorp 4y ago
      No, not x86 Windows. You can only virtualize ARM Windows, which the other answers mean.
  • 1123581321 4y ago
    When Apple released its $500 ARM dev kit ahead of the M1, they offered a $200 credit in exchange for return. Something equivalent seems appropriate here. This isn’t meant to be a computer for mass consumption so shouldn’t be compared to the M1 Mini.
• binkHN 4y ago
  I don’t know if Windows on ARM has a future, but, IMHO, almost anything that encourages more happenings in the ARM ecosystem is a benefit—the whole world has gone mobile, and its longer battery life takes the cake over its more powerful x86/amd64 counterparts.
• dihydro 4y ago
  If the ethernet port doesn't support multigigabit Ethernet, that is a shame. WiFi 6 is great, but we need more development, deployment, and support of multigigabit ethernet for corporate and enterprise customers!
  • faeriechangling 4y ago
    There’s little point to such a feature for the intended use case, which is just to run some VMs to test builds on. At $600 with 32gb of ram multi-gig is asking a little much.
    • megous 4y ago
      Not it's not, even $150 SBCs like odroid-h3 can have 2x 2.5gbit ethernet ports. For server usecase this is very unbalanced as far as connectivity goes. Say you want to use the modem or wifi for internet access. Modem gives you 5gbit/s and you'll get out to your network just 1gbit. Wasteful, and it needlessly limits the opportnities.
      • kcb 4y ago
        You can put a 2.5gbe adapter on the USB ports I guess.
        • megous 4y ago
          That would likely be stretching the USB interface to the limit. Ethernet is full-duplex, USB is not. Also this SoC doesn't even seem to have proper publicly available datasheet, and whatever marketing stuff qcom has on their website doesn't list USB at all, lol. So for all I care it can have just one host controller. Not interested in SoC with no datasheets, when it's not possible to answer basic questions about the SoC, like how many USB host controllers it has...
          • smileybarry 4y ago
            USB 3.x is full-duplex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0
• moffkalast 4y ago
  Ah yes, the Microsoft NUC.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    I'm glad there's more serious competition in this space. And apparently I'm not alone in this opinion. From 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783924 > Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decently performant machine. The 8th generation Intel NUC are good, but 28W TDP and it'd be nice to get it much, much lower than that. I know these are a small fraction of the overall market but personally I think it'd be cool. Once you want something more powerful than Raspberry Pi or a board based on a mobile SoC your options whittle down considerably. There are "mini/micro" PCs but they don't touch the lack of power consumption.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Well for what it's worth, Synology makes some ARM powered NASes. But I suppose those fall under the mobile SoC category.
      • Spivak 4y ago
        I've always been tempted by them but the price per compute power never got to the point where I wanted to pull the trigger. I don't fault them at all for their design choices, they make complete sense, but I wanted the box to be more compute/memory heavy.
        • hedora 4y ago
          For me, Synology is the remaining niche where Intel is still competitive. Whoops. Never mind; they have an AMD Ryzen model now: https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/DS1621_Plus_PR/Synology®%20Announces%20the%20Six-Bay%20DS1621+%20Featuring%20AMD%20Processor https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/DS1621_P...
• tmikaeld 4y ago
  So, "everyone" is switching to ARM now?
  • throwntoday 4y ago
    Take a look at what Apple is doing today to find out what the industry is doing in a year or two.
    • counttheforks 4y ago
      Break the build tools for their cash cow about once a month, and forbid anyone from developing for it without spending thousands of dollars on new hardware?
      • karamanolev 4y ago
        Seems to be working out for them alright. I'd love to make fun of them for similar reasons, but look at market, and more importantly, mind, share...
        • counttheforks 4y ago
          Where would we be if we can't make fun of popular things?
    • jccalhoun 4y ago
      Windows has been on ARM since 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT
      • chasil 4y ago
        Windows CE was actually on it long before this. The original launch of CE was on MIPS and Super-H, but ARM appears to have gained support with Windows CE version 2.2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_Compact
• gw99 4y ago
  The gen2 was scoring only half an M1 in performance. With the bloat of windows on top this is going to be horrible.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lostmsu 4y ago
  Lack of HDMI is disappointing.
  • montecarl 4y ago
    A <$10 cable solves this problem.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • regular 4y ago
  • cjensen 4y ago
    HDMI connectors cost a lot of money to the HDMI licensing authority. This payment is very painful if you have a small quantity of shipments. DisplayPort is free. And as others have pointed out, you just need to buy a cable.
    • encryptluks2 4y ago
      Wouldn't display over USB-C solve this as well?
      • Joe_Boogz 4y ago
        It looks like this does support display over USB-C - the tech specs have a snippet saying that you should use DP over USB-C so you see the BIOS.
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  Sorry Microsoft, you lost me with Windows 11. I'll wait until you release a worthy successor to Windows 10, just like when I skipped Vista.
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    I also skipped Windows Millennium and Windows 8.
    • fxtentacle 4y ago
      Yeah ME was awful, too. I thought 8.1 was actually OK.
  • jstimpfle 4y ago
    Is there a list of things that are worse with 11? I had it pushed on one of my less frequently used devices and so far all that has been annoying has been the Explorer context menu which hides "less used" items (some of which I frequently need, of course) behind a "More" entry.
    • nevi-me 4y ago
      I'd also be curious to know. I've found Win11 to mostly be a skin on top of 10. Maybe I'm biased because I'm on the Insider Program, and I get changes incrementally instead of as a big release in 2 years
    • taspeotis 4y ago
      Personally I find Windows 11 fine although the decision to make the start bar only icons instead of icon + text is a bit bizarre in today’s trend towards (ultra)wide monitors.
      • nightski 4y ago
        I despise the fact that there is no right-click/context menu on the task bar. I use that frequently.
• nevi-me 4y ago
  It continues to suck how African countries are excluded from these product launches and from many products in general. Microsoft has enough partners and regional offices because Office365 and Azure are the only worthy products for us in "shithole countries". If Microsoft isn't intending on selling a lot of these devices, the cost of adding 1 or 2 African countries would be relatively small compared to the revenue they make from our regions. I mean, expensive Macs came out, costing twice the shitty HP/Lenovo/Dell enterprise offerings with poor thermals and battery life. We bought them. I would buy this device if it was for sale in my market, I see a benefit in testing my work on Windows ARM64.
  • MikusR 4y ago
    They exclude about 180 countries
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    >It continues to suck how African countries are excluded from these product launches All South American, most Asian and most European countries are excluded. That sucks, too.
    • d4mi3n 4y ago
      Do we have any sense of how much of this is driven by privacy regulation? Newer versions of Windows have been more aggressive about collecting user information, so this would not at all surprise me.
      • ohbtvz 4y ago
        The EU has probably some of the strictest privacy regulations in the world. I don't really get why you would think that.
      • bornfreddy 4y ago
        Given that they are launching in some of the EU countries, not much. That said, I do hope their data harvesting breaks some laws somewhere and they get fined handsomely. This trend is atrocious.
• tristor 4y ago
  This looks like a really good deal for folks using WSL2 and VS Code for development.
• haunter 4y ago
  Well I'd actually buy one of these if I could lol
• haunter 4y ago
  Well I'd actually buy one of these if I could lol
• awill 4y ago
  The difference here is that the M1 in the M1 mac mini is faster than Apple's phone SoC (the A16). The Qualcomm 8cx gen 3 (what a terrible name) in this machine is NOT faster than even Qualcomm's phone SoC (the 8 gen 1), let alone Apple's phone SoC. It's absurd to be selling a desktop PC that's weaker than a phone.
  • Sakos 4y ago
    It's a chicken or the egg dilemma. Non-Apple ARM is too slow, so nobody wants Windows ARM, and nobody wants Windows ARM, so nobody is seriously working on consumer-targeted ARM. It will probably fail because Microsoft is generally bad at managing and marketing their hardware projects and coordinating with manufacturers and retail partners. Also, yeah, the pricing and performance is abysmal. But there is some sense to trying to lay the groundwork for future ARM SoCs running Windows. Right now, the biggest driver for Windows ARM adoption is, ironically, Apple's M1 and onwards because of people running it as a guest OS through Parallels. Also, frankly, I'm okay with Microsoft failing at projects like this. We don't need another Apple-like presence on the market.
    • bigmattystyles 4y ago
      >> Also, frankly, I'm okay with Microsoft failing at projects like this. We don't need another Apple-like presence on the market. Don't we?
      • kstrauser 4y ago
        I’ve gotta agree with you there. I love my Apple gear, but I hear and understand the criticisms against them. The above argument sounds to me like “you think one monopolist is bad? Wait until there are 2 of them!”
        • siggen 4y ago
          It will be an oligopoly then.
• syntaxing 4y ago
  I get it’s way harder for Windows but they failed the first time but Apple succeeded because they went all in for the M1. Windows ARM is doomed to fail with such fragmentation.
• bitL 4y ago
  Maybe I am missing the point, but why wouldn't you rather buy a NUC instead of this slow box? I get it MS wants to be like Apple, meticulously copying anything that pops up there, but their brand is associated with different "experiences" and their main value lies in backwards compatibility and open hardware ecosystem.
  • ykl 4y ago
    The point of this is that it's an Windows-on-ARM devkit; you can't buy a ARM NUC that'll run Windows AFAIK (Intel doesn't make ARM machines), and you can't test ARM software natively on an x86-64 NUC.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • crooked-v 4y ago
    Because Intel performance per watt sucks compared to the competition, mostly.
  • kcb 4y ago
    I doubt this is going to feel slow in actual use. You've got 8 big arm cores with a lot of memory, fast storage, and active cooling.
    • jyrkesh 4y ago
      Having worked with Windows on ARM in the past, I _hope_ you're right. But my experience has been that a ton of code is still going through the x86 emulation layer, which IMO is woefully lacking in performance, particularly compared to Apple's Rosetta 2 (which is a magical marvel of engineering).
      • MikusR 4y ago
        Rosetta feels fast because apple m cpus are about twice as fast as qualcom ones
    • nebula8804 4y ago
• dtx1 4y ago
  And here's the difference between Microsoft and Apple: When Apple switches to ARM, people believe them. When Microsoft switches to arm, people ignore them. Why? Because Microsoft only ever half-asses such changes (see the terrible SOC in this).
  • indrora 4y ago
    They have no better choice. Name me, today, a desktop class ARM SoC that isn't made by Apple and represents the median performance band of the class. Fundamentally, ARM Holdings is what Antitrust legislation was supposed to break down. They own the "ARM" name and control who can license the ARM IP and most importantly, how. Ampere, the folks behind a lot of ARM servers, are by contract barred from getting into the market of making ARM chips for phones, desktops, or otherwise. That's the form of their license: Server-grade 96-core behemoths running at 3+Ghz and with the thermal output of a small space heater. ARM holdings sets all sorts of weird restrictions and forces market segmentation to make sure that nobody "Accidentally" makes something that they don't immediately approve of. Qualcomm is basically locked into making phone SoCs for all eternity until they renegotiate their license with ARM holdings. They're in a shit situation because they have competition all over the place (Allwinner, Rockchip, a legacy Intel series, NXP, and Samsung to name a few), letting ARMHoldings bully them into not making something that rocks the boat too hard. Apple pulled a massive show of force in making ARM license them desktop grade chips. You see, Apple has been a license holder for ARM for a bit now (with the Ax series chips) and makes up, ballpark, 15% of worldwide phones and now >50% of US phones. Apple had already idly said "we could... you know, not use an integrated solution" when they fiddled with Intel's radio baseband. For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk. Qualcomm can't do that. So that leaves Microsoft, who does not want to get into the processor fabrication business and who is still reeling over the antitrust lawsuit 20 years ago (which, I'll point out, was mostly over a shared text mangling library, for what it's worth) out in the dust looking for options, and the option they get is "Whatever Qualcomm will ship them."
    • dtx1 4y ago
• blinkingled 4y ago
  Microsoft's Apple envy continues - additionally hobbled by Qualcomm's indistinguished/2nd rate hardware and disinterested developers.
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    If only MS was a larger company with more market push to get QComm to put effort in it or find another supplier... /s Or maybe, in some twisted logic they want to sabotage their own ARM products in favor of Intel
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • osigurdson 4y ago
    I’d like to be able to run Windows on mac M series.
    • smoldesu 4y ago
      Or full-featured Linux, for that matter.
      • VTimofeenko 4y ago
        Arm64 vms seem to be working great. And pretty soon Asahi will get to the point of being completely usable as a daily driver
        • smoldesu 4y ago
          Why would I buy a Mac Mini for Linux when devices like this exist? The Qualcomm chip is officially supported and much cheaper than buying the Mac. Seems to be much less hassle and better value on the Microsoft side of things.
          • Funnyduck99 4y ago
            Yeah I am seriously considering getting one of these. 32gb of ram for 600 dollars plus its a decent specked arm machine with plenty of ports
• faeriechangling 4y ago
  The hardware looks well suited to a cluster to me especially at the price point and with the presumably low power usage. Smack three of these bad boys together and you’re got about 64gb of memory to work with and 32gb for redundancy for $1800. That’s not terrible considering SBCs only go up to about 16gb of memory and tinyminimicro boxes probably draw a bit more power and don’t cost less new…
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• nottorp 4y ago
  Does it have a power brick larger than the NUC, like those things usually do? Neither the Verge piccies nor the marketing movie are clear on this.
  • Joe_Boogz 4y ago
    X2 - If its ARM / mobile chip I wouldn’t think that the power supply would be very big. Maybe it’s internal?
• jayski 4y ago
  game of thrones has nothing on that Microsoft video...
• solarkraft 4y ago
  Are they actually becoming serious about ARM all of a sudden or is this just a fluke? It speaks volumes that Visual Studio wasn't even available as an ARM version until now.
  • wvenable 4y ago
    First they to make the 64bit version of Visual Studio for x86-64. It seems the ARM port was pretty fast after that.
  • znpy 4y ago
    No, they have been for a while. You don’t port a whole proprietary os to another isa overnight. And iirc windows rt already ran on arm.
• chocolatkey 4y ago
  The most interesting part to me was the quote from Denuvo, presumably testing out pluton: “The Volterra devices are neat and powerful, ideal for us to test our market-leading anti-piracy and anti-cheat game security technologies. They’re also very quiet, and they just work out of the box.” – Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto
  • progbits 4y ago
    Yay, more walled gardens that will break for legitimate customers while pirated version will continue to work forever. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29149555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29149555
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • carlamengo 4y ago
    > “Performance with Volterra has been refreshingly fast. We have run Actipro’s x86-based product installers, and they all worked. Our WPF and WinForms controls all work well with no changes, even the ‘API-heavy’ ones, as does all test collateral.” – Boyd Patterson, Senior Software Engineer, Actipro Software I just thought the same, but not WPF native on arm?, but an emulation layer?, still looks very promising.
    • DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      WPF on .NET 6 is native-on-ARM64 now, apparently: * https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102341/0400/WPF-and--NET-6 https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102341/0400/WPF-and-... * https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/1817 https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/1817 * https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-july-2021/#windows-arm64 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-july-2021/#windows... > Windows Forms and WPF are now supported on Windows Arm64. We added support for Windows Arm64 with .NET 6 Preview 1 and have since backported it to .NET 5 (with 5.0.8). Windows Forms and WPF work the same on Arm64 as they do on x64. You could already use x86 emulation to run Windows Forms and WPF apps on Arm64, however, there was a performance cost to doing so. With this release, you can your apps natively with full performance.
• thallavajhula 4y ago
  I saw the "Stackable" part and thought you could stack one on top of another to have a combined compute + memory available automatically. Now that would've been mind blowing
  • sithadmin 4y ago
    There's actually a small vendor that produced tiny systems that do literally stack like Lego, intended for cluster deployment in edge computing use cases like retail or restaurants. Stacking the units provides all necessary interconnects. I can't remember their name for the life of me, but they demo'd it at VMWorld a few years back. The economics versus boring pizzabox or compact blade systems probably never worked out in their favor, hence why I'm having so much trouble tracking them down again. Edit: found them. I guess they're still alive. Hivecell: https://hivecell.com/ https://hivecell.com/
• atarian 4y ago
  I have a feeling that Microsoft is eventually going to follow Apple’s playbook and completely exit the desktop OS business to focus on their own line of products.
  • sangnoir 4y ago
    Their current strategy is the opposite of what you stated: it is to ensure MS software and services run on every imaginable product, including those made by others, including competitors. Hence XBox pass, VS Code / Edge on Linux, Office 360 on iOS/Android, etc.
• FortiDude 4y ago
  Damn, is that my new Linux ARM home PC? hehe
• Manozco 4y ago
  It could make for an interesting server for homelab if we can easily install Linux on it. Does anyone know if there is some kind of lock that prevents installation of another OS ?
• cpsns 4y ago
  800$ in Canada, at that price point it’s impossible to justify buying it instead of an M1 Mac Mini for 100$ more as a general use machine, especially given the sorry state of Windows-ARM. Given it’s a dev kit companies won’t care about cost, but I can’t see many being sold to independent/small developers, the excitement just isn’t there.
  • bpye 4y ago
    I initially had the same reaction but the 900$ Mac Mini has only 8GB of memory, 256GB of storage and can only drive two displays, vs this which has 32GB of memory, 512GB of storage and can drive three displays.
• pid-1 4y ago
  Why would anyone buy that before Windows users are actually using ARM?
  • wmf 4y ago
    Maybe MS is giving these for free to important developers.
  • timbit42 4y ago
    To run Linux on it, if it isn't locked out.
  • abudabi123 4y ago
    Maybe the usecase for this 32GB pre-halloween box release is to run the dotnet stuff on an agnostic headless operating system at the edge fanning in FPGA sensor, actuator things. The next after ARM is RISCV. ARM has been done.
• mdasen 4y ago
  I think Windows on ARM still faces the same problem it always has: there's little reason for most people to care and it creates a collective action problem. With macOS on ARM, Apple said they'd stop making Intel machines and they launched a compelling new experience. If you were a developer, you knew you needed to get on board or be left behind. If you were a user, you probably wanted one of the shiny new M1 machines, but even if you didn't you were going to be moving to ARM the next time you upgraded a few years down the line. Users also knew that software would be ported to ARM because it was the only way forward for the Mac. Microsoft isn't abandoning x86. So why should developers care about Windows on ARM? Why should users choose Windows on ARM when developer support is poor - Microsoft just got Visual Studio on ARM. Why should users choose Windows on ARM when the ARM processors being offered are way behind what Apple/Intel/AMD are offering for processors? With developers and users unenthusiastic about ARM, why should chip companies want to invest in laptop/desktop ARM chips? Why should a hardware company start making ARM machines that just incur losses for a few generations as they manufacture things users aren't interested in? There are certainly reasons to care, but it's a lot harder to justify. Maybe Qualcomm thinks it can create a new laptop/desktop chip business to rival Intel/AMD. That's certainly a good incentive, but I'm sure they've had meetings where they've talked about Microsofts lukewarm support for ARM, how to get users to buy an inferior product in the meantime (eg. until they create better chip designs and until devs port things to ARM), how to get devs to port things to ARM despite little user demand, and how to get hardware companies to want their laptop/desktop chips despite all this. I'm not saying that Windows on ARM won't happen. I think we're in a time when CPU-independence is a lot easier and there's a lot of money to be made. However, it won't happen nearly as quickly as Apple's transition - because people have a choice in the matter. Intel/AMD CPUs are likely to be significantly better (than non-Apple ARM CPUs) for years to come. If Intel is able to get back on track in terms of process, it'll be even harder for Qualcomm and others to match. And Microsoft is likely playing a harder game when it comes to translating x86 software. Apple mirrored Intel's memory guarantees in their ARM chips, but the ARM spec doesn't require that. That makes translating a lot easier/faster, but if Windows for ARM is going to work with weaker guarantees, that makes it a harder sell. With Intel and AMD doing decently well at the moment, there's less reason for users. Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. Hardware manufacturers will like having additional suppliers (even if the new ARM machines are partly just to get some leverage with Intel/AMD). Microsoft will want to make sure that Windows doesn't suffer if Intel/AMD stumble in the future. It's just going to be a long slog convincing developers and users that it's worth their time and money. Over a long enough time frame, I think new apps will be ARM/x86 and users will be fine with them at the right price/performance point, but it's not going to be like Apple's transition where people were enthusiastic.
• m000 4y ago
  Would this run WSL by any chance?
  • Wohlf 4y ago
    WSL already runs on Windows 10/11 ARM in non-S mode, so no reason to assume it won't.
• GekkePrutser 4y ago
  So the big question... Can it run Linux?
  • jenscow 4y ago
    Of course, but the real question is: can it run Windows?
    • bluescrn 4y ago
      Or: can it run unsigned code?
      • generj 4y ago
        For a developer focused machine? Nearly certainly.
      • sedatk 4y ago
        Or: will it blend?
• Joe_Boogz 4y ago
  It appears the consensus is HN is hesitant about the Windows on ARM push. I really want this to succeed. If this gains traction then we should start seeing support for windows laptops on ARM. As a dev who prefers windows but has a m1 MacBook b/c of the battery life I really hope this works out.
  • detaro 4y ago
    There are Windows ARM laptops already, and their existence does a lot to justify that hesitancy.
    • Joe_Boogz 4y ago
      Previous laptops and current surface devices do support ARM, but IMO nothing MSFT has put out has been serious. (Looking at you Surface Pro X). This targeted solution correctly identifies the main problem with Windows on ARM. Lack of developer support. Outside of internal MSFT dev support no one has taken Windows/ARM support seriously. I hope these dev kits represent a wider market push that ultimately leads to better Windows laptops on ARM. (Ones that can close to gap with the current MacBook lineups).
      • doublerebel 4y ago
        The new Surface Pro 7 ARM looks serious — it does seem to be the first serious ARM entry, though. Lack of Windows ARM devices for dev really has hamstrung Hololens 2 development — it’s also Windows ARM and there are very few libraries with Windows ARM compatibility. I altered many libraries myself, despite that the documentation was nearly nonexistent.
    • pornel 4y ago
      Of course Qualcomm being chronically incapable of making fast CPUs doesn't help, but partly it's just a chicken-egg problem of lack of ARM-optimized Windows software caused by the lack of ARM Windows users. Having a decent devkit may help bring more native ARM software, which may make these underpowered machines struggle less with speed and compatibility.
• mhd 4y ago
  I wouldn't mind MS hardware if it were designed by the people who did the first Natural Keyboard or the Intellimouse…
• jmrm 4y ago
  This is pretty interesting. I'm just imaging a future with inexpensive Windows ARM machines, passively-cooled, and running in most of the offices of your country. With most of the important Microsoft software already compiled to ARM, and with those kits available to developers to do compile theirs at a competitive price, I won't doubt that future could be possible.
  • layer8 4y ago
    There are huge amounts of existing x86 software in use, including Office add-ins, Explorer extensions, and COM dependencies in general, that won’t be recompiled to ARM. The only way ARM would take over is if compatibility with existing binaries is maintained (which is very difficult if not impossible for x86 DLLs within ARM-based applications), and if their execution remains sufficiently performant.
    • mmis1000 4y ago
      Microsoft takes years to develop their own version of rosetta after the fail of Windows rt. And I think you are already able to use it now, you can already run x86 on Windows on arm vm on mac(m1). Just wondering the performance when running it on the dev kit they sell now.
      • layer8 4y ago
        You can run a self-contained x86 application and self-contained ARM applications, but you can’t integrate between ARM applications and x86 in-process components (DLLs etc.), and such integration is how a lot of things work in practice on Windows. Converting an x86 application to ARM means losing those integrations, and that is a major hurdle to adoption.
        • MikusR 4y ago
          https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/load-x64-plug-ins-like-vsts-from-your-arm-code-using-arm64ec/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/load-x64-pl...
• tomcam 4y ago
  Haven’t bought a Windows machine in a few years. It seems like this would likely be useful as a general purpose development machine because there is probably no crapware installed. Do you think this is a plausible argument to buy one or are they now all infested no matter what?
  • sedatk 4y ago
    My experience with Windows 11 so far has been great.
  • smoldesu 4y ago
    It might not get the longest-term support, but it seems like a half-decent deal. If you're comfortable turning it into a home server/compute module once it reaches EOL, I'd say go for it.
    • tomcam 4y ago
      Yeah I like that choice to
      • tomcam 4y ago
        * too
  • dgellow 4y ago
    I wouldn’t recommend Windows on arm if you just want a general purpose machine, it is still very niche and will need time to be well supported. Just get a desktop with a recent Intel or AMD and reinstall the OS if you want to ensure you have something clean.
    • tomcam 4y ago
      Well, a general purpose development machine. I’d like to be able to run office and a go compiler, not games
      • 4y ago
• Nican 4y ago
  Jeff Atwood 5 years ago: "the Qualcomm hardware people told Google internally they were 5 years behind Apple on hardware. This was about 1.5 years ago, but I believe that's about right." ( https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1050538041796788225 https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1050538041796788225) And benchmarks continue to show: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/1584350796233117696 https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/1584350796233117696
  • MBCook 4y ago
    Someone had a battery life test for phones. The iPhones beat the android phones in nearly every test by hours. And they only had 60-70% of the raw battery capacity. And you know they have faster processors too. It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened. If I want a new PC laptop, it just won’t compare because no reasonable part is available for the heat/battery life I could have gotten.
    • karmelapple 4y ago
      Who went back to AMD/Intel stuff? Any Apple user is far away from that, and comparing the performance, heat, noise, and battery differences between my Intel and Apple Silicon computers, I have no desire to regularly use an Intel machine until they make some stratospheric leap. (I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)
      • MBCook 4y ago
        I meant the rest of the industry. They said “wow” and then went back to business as usual. They had talking points about how they’ll improve and performance (as always) and efficiency got talked up more. But when will any of that show up? Hardware takes time but I just don’t see reviewers demanding it. They’ll be happy if it shows up but they’re not calling out “this isn’t good enough” and I just don’t get it. How can they use an M1 and go back to a hot low battery life Intel laptop in the same price class and say “this is fine?”
• functorg 4y ago
  Very interesting to see that it has a built-in NPU. Such co-processors are increasingly being included in recent high-end mobile phone platforms, used mostly to accelerate image processing algorithms. Seems like this is a sign of things to come in Windows platforms too, since Microsoft are including an NPU in this devkit. The PC of the future may well end up being CPU+GPU+NPU as standard, much as it is CPU+GPU today.
  • kimburgess 4y ago
    I’m almost willing to bet this is early look at what a ‘native’ Microsoft Teams Room device is. Currently Microsoft relies on a partner ecosystem for compute in these, but given the push into more features built around real-time image processing, dealing with multiple cameras, multiple audio channels and other latency sensitive workloads this seems like a perfect platform to distribute that.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  This device uses UEFI or U-BOOT?
  • bpye 4y ago
    UEFI
• xemdetia 4y ago
  I kind of hoped this was a laptop instead of an all in one. I have a Lenovo x13s and I really like it. The windows on ARM experience with win 11 is almost surprisingly good compared to early arm iterations.
• rkagerer 4y ago
  Not to be confused with Voltera, a company in Canada that makes desktop PCB printers.
• mrlonglong 4y ago
  I've spent ages trying to get Windows 10 Pro for ARM to run on my raspberry pi w/ 8GB. Seems to boot and then spend age doing sod all. Maybr some day it'll get better but until then I'm sticking with Linux. <3
• Kukumber 4y ago
  At this price, with that HW, they are either delusional, or they have to pay insane fees to Qualcomm, they should have built their own silicon That's what decades are poor management gets you, you late to the party with expired food Apple was smarter when they came up with their M1; with an aggressive pricing and excellent performance/watt
• fleddr 4y ago
  Honestly, if Apple were to care, they could undo the course of computing history where at one point Windows became the monopoly. Launch a 500$ category laptop, say 3 gens old. That would soon be M1. Won't be very profitable, but a direct competitor to the typical crappy Windows low-end laptop. Yet it's so much better in performance, security, battery life, total lifespan, etc. Double down on making it idiot-proof. Optimize the onboarding experience for ex-Windows users, including prominent placement of alternatives for popular W32 software. Make sure Office works well, and so on. I would admit that it would take many years to make a dent, but there's no rush to it. Windows seems a sitting duck. Nobody, including Microsoft, seems to care about it. Edit: oh yes, forgot about gaming.
  • robertlagrant 4y ago
    I think the build quality of the thing might be more of the cost than the difference in power. Could be wrong, though.
  • coolca 4y ago
    They could make a m1 SE in late 23 with a plastic case as old MacBooks, same ports of m1 air, slightly less battery and 1080p screen at 500$ and it will sell like crazy.
    • typon 4y ago
      Why would Apple jeopardize its brand (premium products) when they are already printing enough money?
      • lmm 4y ago
        Their consumer base is shrinking even as it becomes more profitable. I doubt they have the nerve to cannibalize their high-end branding and profits, but if current trends continue then they're in trouble in the long run.
    • skim_milk 4y ago
      I think the only problem with this is that that Apple permanently switched to higher resolution screens, text looks awful at 1080p since Apple dropped font anti aliasing. High DPI screens are a requirement.
• cylinder714 4y ago
  I'm stoked to see this as it's one more platform that can run OpenBSD 7.2. From the release announcement last week (https://www.openbsd.org/72.html https://www.openbsd.org/72.html): New/extended platforms: - Added support for Ampere Altra - Added support for Apple M2 - Added support for Lenovo ThinkPad x13s and other machines using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC.
  • aliqot 4y ago
    I want to be on OpenBSD so bad but support is not the same as full support. There are still issues like battery life, GPU, etc. AFAIK everything still happens on the CPU, which increases battery draw.
• nuc1e0n 4y ago
  Does windows on arm have emulation for x86 programs? I'd think something like what apple has done in the past with rosetta would be a necessity. It doesn't have to be super fast, just work well enough.
  • Scharkenberg 4y ago
    Yes, both 32-bit and 64-bit apps should work, as long as they don't rely on low-level x86 stuff.
    • nuc1e0n 4y ago
      Why isn't this capability highlighted more?
      • Scharkenberg 4y ago
        I don't know, perhaps because it's not that new. It's very nice to have though. On the other hand this particular device is meant as a dev kit for making ARM apps (either new ones or porting traditional programs to ARM) - it would be a little bit ironic if x86 compatibility were to be highlighted here.
  • dignick 4y ago
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8... Yes, but not for drivers (so device manufacturers have to write drivers specifically for ARM)
  • tim-- 4y ago
    It sure does! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8... It's probably nowhere near as good as Apple's emulation. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-on-arm-this-is-how-well-64-bit-emulation-is-working/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-on-arm-this-is-...
• kristianp 4y ago
  I'm surprised at the price for a 32GB RAM device. I'm tempted to get one just to double the ram of my desktop, despite probably being slower than my i7-3770. It might be a good platform to work on Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) code without needing to rent a Graviton from AWS. Anandtech about the cpu: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17127/qualcomms-8cx-gen-3-for-notebooks-nuvia-core-in-20222023 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17127/qualcomms-8cx-gen-3-for... Some info about the ARMv8.2-A Architecture (2017): https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architectures-and-processors-blog/posts/arm-architecture-armv8-2-a-evolution-and-delivery https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...
  • whalesalad 4y ago
    Funny, I have an i7-3770K as my gaming rig and to this day still play Warzone regularly on it. Such a workhorse for being 10 years old.
• LeonM 4y ago
  If I click on the "You can purchase the dev-kit here" button, I get "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found". Probably because the device is not available in my country, but then at least show a page explaining I can't purchase the device based on my IP or whatever. This was a really bad experience.
  • _trackno5 4y ago
    I connected to a UK server through my VPN and managed to put in an order :)
• rafaelturk 4y ago
  Sleek device...
• withinrafael 4y ago
  This is Microsoft's second go at a developer-focused ARM kit. You may recall the first was called the Snapdragon Developer Kit [1] and was a miserable machine. It appears Microsoft has already pulled it from the Microsoft Store [2]. There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.) Seems like a truly decent machine (ordered one) but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development. After years and years of development platform missteps and PC usage pattern changes, I fear web (electron, etc.) has become good enough for Windows users. [1] https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/windows-on-snapdragon/snapdragon-developer-kit https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/windows-on-snapdrago... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/ecs-liva-mini-box-qc710-desktop/8z247h1h3skp https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/ecs-liva-mini-box-qc710-de...
  • my123 4y ago
    Snapdragon Developer Kit was built with a "cost above all" mandate, $219 target pricing but it just wasn't powerful enough. > There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.) Azure cloud instances are also an option. > but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development I think that there is. If there isn't, Windows has bigger problems...
    • DenisM 4y ago
      > Azure cloud instances are also an option. I couldn’t find ARM with windows, can you help?
      • jhickok 4y ago
        It's in Public Preview, I believe. I was able to create one relatively easily. https://imgur.com/a/bHXcNTz https://imgur.com/a/bHXcNTz
        • 4y ago
• solardev 4y ago
  Who is still developing for Windows at all, much less Windows on ARM? It's mostly just games and a handful of professional apps, no?
• DenisM 4y ago
  So is it possible yet to install a Windows 11 copy on an ARM Mac in VMWare or such? Officially. Lots of people have Macs already.
• tokamak 4y ago
  Too little too late. Apple silicon remains king of value. M1 Linux advances. I guess it's time to go Apple...
• mikewarot 4y ago
  Minority opinion: As long as I can program it in assembler, and directly call GUI routines in the OS to build windows, etc., I don't care much what CPU its running on.
• stevefan1999 4y ago
  Despite being in Hong Kong I'm really excited to buy one if it is available in my region natively (so I don't have to pay in RMB which is very volatile recently). Most of you guys forgot that you can run WSL in ARM as well -- yes, the same WSLg is capable of running Android on Windows on ARM, natively and very much faithfully. This could mean a whole lot of things including a much-integrated testing and app development pipeline with a whooping 32G of LPDDR4X memory, that means it is finally possible to run a lot of dev software most likely such as java, dotnet and node stuff that can offer day-0 cross platform support. I'm thus very confused why Microsoft is marking Volterra to run AI workload despite the it should be richer on the other side
• apatheticonion 4y ago
  Fantastic! I can't wait to install Windows on my M1 MacBook!
• blodkorv 4y ago
  How far away am i where i can have a windows arm laptop to develop php applications on and superb battery life?
  • rbanffy 4y ago
    Is Windows a better option for PHP development? What other tools you use in your dev cycle that favor Windows?
    • blodkorv 4y ago
      I think Windows is the best platform for PHP development. I just need to install wamp and vs-code and then am good to go. I can use whatever hardware i want without worrying about drivers and compatibility and just about every other advantage windows have. I have not yet found an alternative for HeidiSQL thats free to use that works on other platforms, every other alternative costs money and or is not as good. HeidiSQL on wine is horrible.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  Who's the intended buyer for this? Someone intending to make Windows ARM hardware who wants a reference to test the drivers on? I find it hard to believe that app developers need it, because they can just use qemu.
• morekozhambu 4y ago
• edub 4y ago
  A lot of people commenting that MS should not have went with Qualcomm on this device, although I don't think this locks Windows into Qualcomm. More importantly, I'm super curious to see what Qualcomm announces in December in reference to the next generation chips being designed by the Nuvia team (some of the people that designed the M1). ARM is suing to prevent it, but that seems shortsighted, and I assume it will net out that the Nuvia design will launch, but may have to pay some additional license money to ARM. FWIW the M1 is a little more than twice as fast on GeekBench, but also uses twice the power (TDP). So sort of similar speed score per watt, so possibly they can be within the same ballpark as Apple in the next couple years.
• _trackno5 4y ago
  I'm so hyped about this. I'm sure this won't be M1-levels of performance, but I'm glad to see Microsoft move towards ARM. I can totally see in a few years more manufacturers building ARM-based SoCs to run on laptops, desktops, etc. Makes me happy I TA'd a course on ARM programming 10 years ago.I'm extremely bullish on ARM's future.