Microsoft's New Mini PC for Devs - Project Volterra (AKA Windows Dev Kit 2023)

The Windows Dev Kit 2023 is an Arm-powered mini PC built by Windows developers for Windows developers. It has everything you need to develop Windows apps for Arm, on Arm including powerful AI tech via Qualcomm's AI Engine. This device sports 32 GB RAM and 512 GB of storage. Plus Wi-Fi 6, physical ethernet, 3x USB-A and 2x USB-C, and a Mini Display port. It can drive up to 3 external monitors simultaneously!

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#garyexplains

[sjzara]

I’m running Windows 11 for ARM on a VM on my M2 Mac. It’s impressive - the emulation of 32-bit and 64-bit Intel apps is extremely fast.

[michaeldobeck]

Will the Pi Pico C and C++ tool set run on this?

[obinnaokafor]

I love it. It will enable us to port our apps to Windows on Arm

[TheBadFred]

Can you run Manjaro or any other Linux Distro like Armbian on Project Volterra?

[meliodas.]

And IT IS a sponsored video . I can clearly see that.

It is good info. And I'd love to see more open ARM options coming . And I hope they don't just lock it for windows. Should be able to run whichever os we need.

[tonysheerness]

The sound filtering on the demo was mind blowing.

[N....]

I've been using this for months, it works pretty well. Though, I have had it unexpectedly power off multiple times while watching livestreams on it, so it's really best suited to development.

[mannkeithc]

The Microsoft Dev Kit 2023 is a great Mini PC. I bought mine Nov 2022, and it's now my daily driver. It feels snappy when running native ARM binaries such as Microsoft 365 and Edge, and x64 emulation performs better than expected. It outperforms my Intel NUC with an 8th gen i7 core processor with Intel Iris Plus graphics. WSL2 with GUI support and WS for Android all work well. The only downside with WSL2 there is currently no hardware accelerated graphics support. I think this is a kernel issue as hardware graphics acceleration support for the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is supposedly included in version 5.20 kernel whereas WSL2 currently runs a 5.15 version kernel. I hope this gets addressed soon. Visual Studio 2022 runs OK, though I've had some issues recompiling x86 / x64 software for arm64 where OpenGL graphics used. Initially, I had problems using vcpkg to build OpenGL libraries for arm64, but I retried again today and was successful. The other issue with OpenGL is there doesn't appear to be any direct graphics driver support. Instead, an OpenCL and OpenGL compatibility pack is installed via the Microsoft Store which provides a translation layer with the DirectX 12 graphics driver. This includes hardware acceleration for supported apps, but I am not sure this works all OpenGL apps.

[Fan_of_Ado]

The AI engines probably don't matter to most people but I find them quite interesting. Right now, training and using inference models require expensive GPUs to utilize. Dreaming of a day when that can be achieved with dedicated AI cores so I can run Stable Diffusion or OPT/GPT locally

[TheBadFred]

Is it Possible to compile a C++ Unreal5 code base for ARM?

[samfisher]

How about the GPU inside of it?
What's it performance (in numbers)?
Can any game/app recognize's it?
How's the windows drivers on it?
Are the drivers open sourced as well?

[TheBadFred]

How many 3rd party libraries and tools are available for ARM ?

[unicaller]

Finally a decent specked and priced ARM dev kit for Windows!

[EnochGitongaKimathi]

The Windows on Snapdragon I’m hoping for is Hamoa with Oryon CPU

[learningbird]

Gary, have you tried Linux on this computer?

[lbcck]

I hope somewhere down the line, performance numbers include power efficiency. I am so close to dumping my Apple ecosystem of devices and going back to Windows/Android once Windows on Arm (including gaming 🙂) comes to similar performance as Apple devices on Apple Silicon.

[inamulbhuyan]

Qualcomm Oryon CPU coming in 2023 for Windows Laptop. Oryon is arm based desktop level power processor.

[williamstevenson]

How is this project affected by Qualcomm-ARM Wars? Anybody know?

[Kosme]

Any idea on when something like this could be launched for the consumer market?

[FlopMeister]

How much would this unit cost if it had a RISC-V cpu rather than Arm?