During its Build conference, Microsoft unveiled a new developer kit called Volterra, to promote the transition of its applications to the Arm architecture.
Microsoft’s Build is an event normally dedicated to developers and software, but this year the manufacturer unveiled a new mini PC in passing. This Volterra project is original since the computer embeds a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm in a mini box. An Arm architecture here not really intended for the general public, but rather for developers in order to make a transition from x86 applications to Arm.
A new hope?
This is not Microsoft’s first attempt in this area since the Surface Pro X had already tried the exercise without much success, however. Few applications ran natively under Arm at the time and the emulation of x86 and x64 applications was not the smoothest.
Microsoft therefore intends to follow in the footsteps of Apple, which has managed an almost total transition of all its Intel processors to its new M1s in less than two years, with the successes that we know in terms of energy consumption and performance. Microsoft’s strategy will be different, however, the idea not being to abandon classic architectures and the Windows/Intel, Windows/AMD relationship (for the moment anyway).
Few details were given on this Volterra project which is truly the Windows counterpart of the Mac mini M1 except for a few photos of the box and its connections. The Snapdragon model has not been made official, but we can think that it will be an 8cx Gen 3 presented in December 2021 by Qualcomm and which promises much better performance than the previous generation.
A priori, however, it will be difficult to compete with the latest chips from Apple, AMD and Intel… The goal is not, in any case, to deliver a high-performance machine, but enough so that developers can work efficiently, in particular thanks to the presence of an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) chip dedicated to AI, all directly on a PC equipped with Arm.
We hope in any case that this project will allow Microsoft to accelerate the development of its applications under Arm in order to offer portable PCs (and other mini PCs) to the general public up to the side of performance and autonomy. The delay will be complicated to catch up, Apple having for the moment a good head start, all the more so if the M2 chips are announced soon, as early as June 6 at WWDC perhaps.