Microsoft built a Mac mini? Apple could have ARM competition...

It seems like Microsoft may have caught the ARM bug... at Build22 they announced Project Volterra, a Mac mini DTK clone that aims to get ARM devices into the hands of developers! Microsoft's big gamble here is to expand support to ARM for future devices, so will it work?

time stamps
0:00 intro
2:15 State of Windows ARM
4:25 Project Volterra

Gear:
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[lukemiani]

What do you think this could mean for future PCs and potentially the return of Bootcamp?!

[trismegistus]

Many developers for Windows haven't even completed the transition to 64 bit, so I wouldn't expect them to creative native-ARM apps.

[davidg]

There is unquestionably a desire for Windows on ARM by users.
Just look at the WOR (Windows On Raspberry-Pi) community that's been working furiously to get Win10 and Win11 fully functional on RPis. The community is pretty close to 100% functionality -- almost all of an RPi's hardware is now fully supported, and it runs surprisingly well despite the RPi's fairly low specs. WOR definitely *is not* a desktop PC replacement, but *is* a strong indicator of how well Win10/Win11 can work on a higher spec ARM SoC.

[WilSan]

Microsoft promised the same hybrid local+cloud BS for the Xbox One. Game physics/texture rendering would be cloud assisted. Flight Simulator does use some of this tech on current gen systems, but it isn’t as ubiquitous as MS promised us.

[possamei]

There needs to be some kind of hardware accelerated translation of x86 to ARM instructions, like Apple did with their sillicon. Otherwise, the app gap will ALWAYS be insurmountable to the user. With such hardware, at least the experience will be good *enough* with non-native apps for a switch, rather than so horrible that switching to ARM doesn't even make sense.

[gerbosan]

The copy is the best compliment.
Would it let run Linux? Is it going to be used as a Hackintosh?

[N....]

I'm surprised you didn't mention the QC710 developer kit for Windows on ARM, which has been out for months already and is sold directly from the Microsoft store

[wb_finewoodworking]

Luke, you made some very interesting points. It seems that Microsoft is trying to be in two places, chip wise, at the same time. By not going “all In” like Apple did I think that eventually this move into ARM might fail - just like the Microsoft phone. Unlike Apple, Microsoft only produces a small fraction of devices for their operating system and very few applications. They depend on a vast variety of manufacturers to create computers that run on Windows. Most of those companies don’t have the resources necessary to switch over to a whole new chip architecture especially if they don’t have to switch. It will be interesting to see what happens.

[randocalrissian]

Mac mini, often imitated never duplicated

[mannkeithc]

I have been extremely impressed by the build quality of recent Apple iPads and Mac products. Where Apple lacks innovation is with its operating systems. Apples operating systems are designed around selling hardware, rather than giving you a great end to end experience in any one product category. This is illustrated by Universal Control and Sidecar that are overly complex pieces of software that require the customer to have both a Mac PC and an iPad rather than giving a customer a Mac OS device with a touch display, or an iPad docked with a keyboard and second monitor a decent operating system that has great dual monitor support, can run VMs and emulators, can format removable drives, etc, etc. The iPad Pro is an excellent piece of computing hardware that could do so much more if it weren't crippled by iPad OS. What excites me about Microsoft's announcement is the potential for new high-performance power efficient Surface laptops / tablets that could give iPad Pros a run for their money, because they can do all the things the iPad Pro can't such as run pro software, Linux GUI apps, android apps, VMs, emulators, etc. At times it feels Apple silicon is wasted on Apple because their operating systems never allow you to realise the full potential of the underlying hardware!

[thejpkotor]

Thin clients, ‘little streaming machines’, as you put it ARE the future. At least as far as big companies, healthcare, and schools are concerned. Many hospitals and universities have had these implemented for several years. It allows you to freely move about between different facilities and just locking/unlocking the machine. It’s highly secure, because there is no data stored on the actual machine. Meanwhile, all of your high-performance applications are still running on the back office servers with lots of failover protection for critical tasks.

[PatrickTCAPIreland]

Mac Mini 2014 was my first Mac, moved i. To an MBP and now a M1 MBA. I will always have a soft spot for the Mini, rivals to it with the same form factor would be cool!

[bakayarouotaku]

As a Windows and Mac guy, I'm all in! More tech innovation the better. But MS has a bad track record of supporting their hardware *cough Surface Phone/Band/Cortana/Kinect*

[IPULCOLUMBIA]

Voltera-THE MEDICATION?? Does PC need meds to work better now ??

[bricksuntold]

I just switched from Win to Mac. So happy I did that move. Even though there's still lot to learn for me, MacOS feels like a home already. I was disappointed how W11 felt unpolished (old menus visible, dark mode is not consistent and many more things).

[JBoya]

The NPU is likely designed for runtime use. Think of it as a fast co-processor for running previously trained Neural Network models at run-time to provide features to the user such as detecting what objects are in this video frame, or translating an English sentence to Japanese in real time. The training of these models can take a long time (hours or days) even in large cloud system (aka Azure billed by the minute for Microsoft) with massive processor arrays. But once trained the model can be run well on hardware with orders of magnitude less performance than the training system, as long that hardware can pass data very quickly through the model.

[SuperKREPSINIS]

0:11 most of ppl expected m series to have 2x generational leaps in performance, atleast all commenst section taves about 2x performance each generation

[blahajenthusiast]

Companies are talking about cloud computing and stuff, but they forget there are countries with very bad and unstable internet, so maybe they should help those countries to have better internet or wait until the majority of the world has decent internet.

[johnkellett]

What is the problem with the USA and computers? The British computer company Acorn used ARM chips before ‘ARM’ did, decades ago. It was put out of business by Micro$oft hype. My wife was a journalist for Acorn User magazine and we still have an Acorn laptop that still works! Intel and other X86 chips have always been inferior. I remember witnessing at a computer exhibition a year old Acorn computer emulating DOS running windows being several seconds quicker than the latest Windows on a 486 chip.

[vanCaldenborgh]

I think, there are loud voices inside the Microsoft teams to head for ARM quite some time, worried looking at the stagnation of the x86/x64 architecture, mainly because of its "broad" construction set, for example hurting very much in the branche prediction pipelines inside the CPU. But Microsoft also could consolidate its market share by being always enough backward-compatible to the former OS versions, from MS-DOS with Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, to 98 to 2000 to XP, all the way to 11. But this compatibility starts hurting more and more, it 5 minutes before 12.