Microsoft has released its Windows 2023 Development Kit (previously known as Project Volterra) for general sale.
The device promises a compact all-in-one workstation for natively building, running, and testing Windows applications, as well as faster AI and machine learning workloads, thanks to the new Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
It is powered by Snapdragon's 8cx Gen 3 compute platform along with Qualcomm's Neural Processing SDK, ensuring peak performance and bringing Microsoft one step closer to creating hybrid compute and data workflows.
Build native apps
The announcement (opens in a new tab) follows its initial presentation at Microsoft Build 2022, where the company laid out its vision for the new development kit, as well as a native Arm toolchain to keep local app development on track. a single device. .
It is also delivered there. Previews of native Arm versions of Visual Studio 2022, the Windows App SDK, and the VC++ runtime are now available, while the .NET Framework 4.8.1 for Arm is released with the Windows 2022 11 Update .
In addition, the .NET 7 toolchain, which aims to provide functional parity for ARM versus the x64 architecture, is also now available in preview, while Microsoft's Azure and Arm64EC virtual machines (VMs) are now publicly available, which ensures that application development and testing is now seamless.
Arm64EC (opens in a new tab) provides a way to integrate native Arm code with x64 code as part of the same process. A potential use case for this could be to gradually move from x64 applications to the Arm architecture, rather than spending time developing for just one platform.
Visual Studio 2022 on Arm, which has been in monthly previews since July, now supports desktop workloads, Windows SDK and Windows App SDK (Win UI) components, as well as web workloads, Universal Windows Platform (UWP) , Node.js and games. developing.
Coinciding with the hardware launch, Microsoft collaboration tools are now also available in Arm, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge web browser, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) (opens in a new tab), and Microsoft OneDrive.
And just to make sure that users never feel the need to walk away from their development kits, several creativity, video conferencing, security, and benchmarking solutions have been ported to Arm devices. There are plenty of names here, like Adobe, Zoom, Sophos, Cisco, PassMark, and Microsoft says more are on the way.
The hardware itself is also exciting. In addition to the above, the device comes with 32GB of LPDDR4x RAM and fast 512GB NVMe SSD storage, plus three USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, and a mini display for maximum device compatibility.
We're certainly impressed on paper and look forward to any new developments that come out at the virtual Arm Dev Summit on October 26 (opens in a new tab).
For now, the Windows 2023 SDK is available for purchase in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and China.