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Microsoft IT Technology

Microsoft's 'Project Volterra' Becomes an Arm-powered mini PC with 32GB of RAM (arstechnica.com) 68

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be releasing new hardware to encourage more developers to start using and supporting the Arm version of Windows. Dubbed "Project Volterra," all we knew about it at the time was that it would use an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and NVMe-based storage, that it would support at least two monitors, and that it would have a decent number of ports. Today, Microsoft is putting Volterra out into the world, complete with a snappy new name: the Windows Dev Kit 2023. From a report: The Dev Kit 2023 will use a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 -- essentially the same chip as the Microsoft SQ3 in the new 5G version of the Surface Pro 9 -- plus 512GB of storage and a whopping 32GB of RAM for the surprisingly low price of $599.

We don't know exactly how fast the 8cx Gen 3 will be (Qualcomm says "up to 85 percent faster" CPU performance than the 8cx Gen 2, which would put it somewhere below but within spitting distance of modern Core i5 laptop CPU). But 512GB of storage and 32GB of memory should make the Dev Kit 2023 useful as a development and testing environment. Microsoft says the box can connect to up to three monitors simultaneously using its two USB-C ports and mini DisplayPort and that up to two of those displays can be 4K screens running at 60 Hz. Three USB-A ports, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.1 round out the connectivity options.
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Microsoft's 'Project Volterra' Becomes an Arm-powered mini PC with 32GB of RAM More

Microsoft's 'Project Volterra' Becomes an Arm-powered mini PC with 32GB of RAM

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  • Question (Score:3)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Monday October 24, 2022 @02:46PM (#62994291) Homepage Journal

    (Preface: I am not a programmer or dev)
    The port of Windows to ARM...is it chock full of legacy backwards-compatibility code, or is a clean-slate design?

    • Windows is generally portable, Microsoft has brought it to several architectures.

      • Windows is generally portable, Microsoft has brought it to several architectures.

        This to me is more important than it being a "clean design", you don't want Windows written from scratch, instead it's better to know that it's been written for different architectures from the start - which is true. So it's not like you will run into many architecture variant bugs at this point.

    • Its windows, you can bet its full of legacy code regardless of a new cpu

    • Re:Question (Score:4, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday October 24, 2022 @03:14PM (#62994431)
      What a loaded question. A clean-slate design might sound better but personally I would choose compatibility over a little more performance. For example, I would have much preferred Office for Mac if it had all the features of Windows Office, even at the cost of nonconformity with Mac appearance guidelines, instead of what it was, which seems to be a clean-sheet re-implementation that will never catch up to the 'real thing' on Windows. Two separate implementations are never going be equals.

      • "I would have much preferred Office for Mac if it had all the features of Windows Office, even at the cost of nonconformity with Mac appearance guidelines"

        Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint for Mac all predate their Windows versions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Clean slate design is something no one needs.

      Some people think they want it. No one actually needs it however, because the goal of OS is not to exist and be cool, but to run things.

      And to run things, it needs to be compatible with things in the first place. And "need" for an OS scales directly with how many things it can run, not how cool "tabula rasa" sounds in a sound bite.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

      (Preface: I am not a programmer or dev) The port of Windows to ARM...is it chock full of legacy backwards-compatibility code, or is a clean-slate design?

      Whichever one you want, it's the other one, becuz M$ is dumb and wrong and bad.

      chock full of legacy backwards-compatibility code?
      So much bloat!!11 M$ is dumb!!

      clean-slate design?
      Change for the sake of change!! M$ is dumb!!!

    • It's the NT kernel, it was a clean-slate design some 30 years ago. It used to be available for several architectures, I still have a preview CD for DEC Alpha laying around. More of a collector's item than for any practical purpose now. Since you're not a programmer is it important that code is make from scratch versus leveraging decades of experience?

      A fair amount of legacy cruft on PC was left behind in the 32-bit compatibility layer, which is technically an optional part of the OS now. There are still of

    • MS has brought over most of the standard Windows APIs. Along with a similar driver model so (theoretically) devices that work on Wintel machines could have their drivers updated to run on WARM.

      • I thought they only support the Win64 and UWP APIs for native Arm apps. No Win32 or anything older. So at least there is that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      What do you think? Incidentally, they main problem with Windows is the messy API, not the not-so-stellar code and that will likely be the same on ARM.

    • A lot of the legacy cruft will be relegated to the emulation subsystem. Once people are ready to run an all-Arm Windows with no legacy applications it will be much cleaner.

  • 1) Great to se other ARM based computing options in the market.

    2) With wider ARM support maybe Bootcamp will come back on the Mac for ARM Windows (or maybe it's already back? Have not kept track).

    3) Seems like a nice cheap Windows development box.

    I wonder how the ARM that Microsoft is using will compared to the Apple modified ARM chips...

  • But I still need to run far too many native x86 apps for this to be useful.

  • As long as Microsoft refuses to release their x86-64 emulator for ARM, their ARM hardware products will flop.

  • Sounds great. I can install Linux on it, right? That doesn't break a EULA or anything?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dskoll ( 99328 )

      My bet is that the bootloader is locked and won't load anything unless it's signed by Microsoft.

      It might be (probably will be) jailbroken, but why would you bother with that when there are plenty of other Arm computers available?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        why would you bother with that when there are plenty of other Arm computers available?

        The same reason folks run Doom on an ATM.

      • Mostly availability of those "plenty of other ARM computers".

        Have you even tried to purchase a Raspberry Pi in the last 6 months? They're backordered into 2023Q3.

      • The price is pretty good for its specs. 32 GB RAM, 512 GB flash, dual 4K monitor support, lots of ports, and the fastest Arm processor that is readily available and doesn't have a picture of fruit on it. What other comparable system do you suggest buying?

    • I can install Linux on it, right? That doesn't break a EULA or anything?

      Note, I've not looked into this at all, not a lawyer, proceed at your own risk, etc.

      If one were to purchase this hardware, I don't see any logical reason why he would be bound to an end-user-licensing-agreement. It's a one-time purchase. Do with it whatever you want.

      • Re:Sounds great. I can install Linux on it, right? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Monday October 24, 2022 @03:26PM (#62994503) Journal

        Well, it's a question of legal maneuvering.

        The purchaser would not be bound to running Windows by a EULA per se, because that could be shown to be anti-competitive. However, they can absolutely lock down the bootloader so that it physically will not boot any OS not signed by a Microsoft key, and then use the DMCA encryption-busting provisions to wrap legal enforcement around it without acceptance of any shrinkwrap EULA.

        Because the DMCA is a huge piece of shit.

    • Re:Sounds great. I can install Linux on it, right? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday October 24, 2022 @03:20PM (#62994473)

      One would worry more about whether it has SecureBoot locked to only Microsoft bootloaders.

      In x86 space they were careful to provide facilities to disable it, enroll your own keys, and sign the leading distributions. In ARM space they may not feel that same requirement and thus not provide a third party OS access.

      They could have done it the 'right' way, like it's usually done in x86, I don't know and I'd wait to find out before considering.

    • The project manager in an interview said that they are calling it a "developer device" because they don't want to officially support dual boot and other possible consumer use cases.

  • ARM is Linux's bread and butter. The fact that Micrpsoft has taken so long to commit to Windows on ARM is a joke. They should have jumped on the ARM train with Windows NT 4.0 back when NT was supporting lots of instruction sets.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Wouldn't have made a difference. NT 4 did support several architectures, but all that died off well before anyone would have guessed ARM would be potentially relevant to desktop/laptop class devices. Microsoft wasn't relevant to embedded devices and thus there was no set intersection for Microsoft to even think of at the time.

      Even now, it's far from a 'given' that ARM will deliver something interesting in the device classes of interest. Vendors have toyed with and abandoned such ambitions so far as not to

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by saider ( 177166 )

        Microsoft tried to be relevant in embedded with Windows CE and later Windows RT. I suspect that this is just more of the same.

      • Even now, it's far from a 'given' that ARM will deliver something interesting in the device classes of interest. Vendors have toyed with and abandoned such ambitions so far as not to be able to make a solid prediction on where the vendors might go yet.

        Apple M1 though

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          I don't see Apple doing anything to facilitate third party OSes on M1. Linux has been grabbing some partial support because of the communities usual enthusiasm to run anywhere, but for Microsoft such an endeavor would be running too far uphill to cater to a market that generally is inherently anti-microsoft.

          As far as an ARM platform that someone like Microsoft could practically consistently target, that has been a bit more of a fickle beast. Qualcomm *may* be more settled in this time, but might want to s

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      Back in the NT days they were working on DEC/Alpha instead. I used to have Windows installed on my little DEC, with their 'adaptive emulator/interpreter', which was interesting stuff.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday October 24, 2022 @04:39PM (#62994691)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Mod parent up. The lack of a standard ARM architecture is the number one thing hold back ARM as far as competition in the laptop, desktop, and server space goes. I'd love to have an ARM laptop and ARM servers but until a standard, generic ISO image from Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu can install on any ARM machine, I'm just not going to waste any time on it. Until this happens ARM will never move beyond the Android device wasteland and embedded computing.

      • Let's not forget that the versions of NT for Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS never went anywhere because they didn't have application or driver support, so there was very little you could run on them other than Microsoft's server applications. Microsoft wasn't willing to strongarm (sic) developers into supporting other architectures, and so far they have shown little appetite for applying the same pressure for Arm support. Microsoft hasn't even ported all of its OWN applications; we're just getting Visual Studio n

    • What's this revisionist bullshit haha?!

      Windows CE ran on ARM\MIPS, followed by windows mobile\phone\mobile. There's been a windows kernel running on ARM for ages.

      On desktop\Server Linus himself dismissed the idea of ARM going mainstream as recently as 2019. That's more than a decade after Microsoft tried to make ARM a primary CPU platform for Windows with the launch of "Windows RT". And even The Surface Pro X on ARM was launched by Microsoft a year before Apple.

      Without a development platform, ARM in the server space is never going to make it. Trying to sell a 64-bit "hyperscaling" model is idiotic, when you don't have customers and you don't have workloads because you never sold the small cheap box that got the whole market started in the first place.

      And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on".

      End result: cross-development is mainly done for platforms that are so weak as to make it pointless to develop on them. Nobody does native development in the embedded space.

      https://www.realworldtech.com/... [realworldtech.com]\

      Microsof

    • There are some other WARM devices, but they're mostly thin-and-light laptops requiring you to purchase them as a part of a cellular plan (or similar).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      ARM is Linux's bread and butter? Are you sure about that? Sure Linux runs on a lots of little ARM SoCs that are used in a variety of embedded applications. But general use? Not even close. ARM is a wasteland on Linux in my opinion. I've said this before. Except for Apple's competition with Wintel, Intel has nothing to fear from ARM for now. Incompatible and wildly proprietary bootloaders, GPUs, etc. Sure you can build a kernel for ARM quite easily, but there's no such thing as a generic ARM Linux dist

      • Yeah, this gets hashed over every time there's a ARM/Windows related topic of discussion. I might say this is the basic difference between just the ARM "ISA" and ARM "Platform". And for now, an "ARM Platform" doesn't exist.

        I'm not sure how much clout MS has left, but I bet, if they just published an "ARM PC" spec, that said, "if you build your hardware/bootloader/basic peripherals like this, then off the shelf copies of Windows will run on your hardware", I bet they'll find several vendors willing to bite

  • Neat, but $600 is no bargain. I suspect there are cheaper alternatives, especially if you don't care for Windows.

    • Surprisingly few. There aren't many serious attempts to update SBCs with modern Qualcomm, Huawei, or Mediatek chipsets. It's hard to find ARM SBCs not based on A72. I think the RK-3588 is now finally available if you go looking for it (it's A76), though it was badly-delayed and I haven't heard much about it.

      Unless you want one of the Qualcomm-based WARM laptops based on some variant of the 8cx, you're kind of SoL.

    • Your only other two options for development on ARM64 with the latest CPUs are a Surface Pro 9 with the SQ3 which costs $1,600 for a similar config. That makes this thing $1,000 cheaper than the closest alternative for Windows Dev.

      If you don't want Windows Dev, your only other high-end ARM dev environment is the Mac Mini which a comparable build runs $1,100 (and has half the RAM). So, this dev kit is $500 cheaper than that too.

    • With this level of CPU and GPU power (that processor is a flagship-level chip if it's in a smartphone), 32 GB RAM, 512 GB flash, dual 4K monitor support, and all those ports? $600 is a bargain for what it is. Not everybody is looking for an Arm system this powerful, but if you're serious about developing for the platform this looks like the thing to get.

  • Linux doesn't run on all ARM systems (Score:3)

    by bustinbrains ( 6800166 ) on Monday October 24, 2022 @07:44PM (#62995123)

    Just a warning in case you are thinking, "Huh, I could dual-boot an ARM flavor of Linux and Windows on this hardware." It might not be as simple as grabbing any ol' distro, slicing off a partition, and installing the image.

    I have sitting next to me a Samsung Galaxy Book Go laptop which has an ARMv8/AARCH64 Qualcomm 7C Gen 2 chip under the hood. It boots and runs Windows 10 just fine. No one to date has gotten any standard downloadable Linux distro compiled for ARM to get past grub on the hardware. Grub loads and works but the whole laptop power cycles as soon as the Linux kernel begins executing code. The general consensus is that Samsung is doing something that intentionally prevents alternate ARM-based OS kernels to be installed/run and might even be something Microsoft requires vendors to implement. Because everyone would have a stroke if Microsoft ever decided to not require vendors to implement a digital middle finger to other OSes - it's part of their DNA as a company. "Oh you want access to the ARM ISOs for Windows 10/11? Gotta sign this legal agreement first."

    • To be honest, I've had a (mostly) positive experience with WSL 2 under Windows, so if an ARM Windows machine were to be able to run an ARM-based Linux in WSL 2, I'd be pretty ok with that.

  • Microsoft is late to the party again. The cool kids have moved on to RISC-V.

  • 32 geebeez of ram is not whopping

    • It is for a little arm turd.

      My desktop only has 16GB and that's enough to play games... or run stable diffusion

  • This isn't a PC. This is a phone without a screen. It is all that ARM is good for. Making devices with walled gardens.

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