Microsoft’s Windows on ARM developer kit is out now
Microsoft’s AI-powered kit is made more appealing by the likes of Adobe and Cisco supporting ARM
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Microsofthas released its Windows Dev Kit 2023 (formerly known asProject Volterra) on 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, owing to the new Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
It’s powered bySnapdragon’s 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platformin tandem withQualcomm’s Neural Processing SDK, ensuring maximum performance and bringing Microsoft one step closer to making hybrid compute and AI workflows the norm.
Arm-native apps
Theannouncementfollows its initial tease at Microsoft Build 2022, where the company outlined its vision for the new development kit, as well anArm-native toolchain to keep application development local to a single device.
It’s delivered there, too. Previews of arm-native versions of Visual Studio 2022, the Windows App software development kit (SDK), and the VC++ Runtime are available now, while the .NET Framework 4.8.1 for Arm has been released withWindows 11’s 2022 update.
In addition, the .NET 7 toolchain, which claims to offer functional parity for ARM against x64 architecture, is now also available in preview, while Microsoft’s Azurevirtual machines(VMs) and Arm64EC are publicly available now, ensuring that development and app testing are now seamless.
Arm64ECoffers a way to integrate native Arm code with x64 code as part of the same process. One potential use-case for this might be to gradually transition x64 apps to Arm architecture, rather than invest time in developing solely for one platform.
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Visual Studio 2022on Arm, which has been 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 hardware launch, Microsoft’scollaboration toolsare now also available on Arm, includingMicrosoft Teams,Microsoft 365, theweb browserMicrosoft Edge,Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE)andMicrosoft OneDrive.
And just to make sure users never feel the need to step away from their dev kits, several creativity,video conferencing, security, and benchmarking solutions have all been ported to Arm devices. There are a lot of names here, likeAdobe,Zoom, Sophos, Cisco, PassMark - and Microsoft claim even more are on the way.
The hardware itself is exciting, too. As well as what was mentioned above, the device sports 32 GB LPDDR4xRAMand a 512 GB NVMeSSDfast storage, plus three USB-A, two USB-C port, and a Mini Display port for maximum device compatibility.
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We’re certainly impressed on paper, and will be looking forward to any new developments that come out on October 26’s virtualArm Dev Summit.
For now, the Windows Dev Kit 2023 is available now for purchase in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and China.
Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.
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