Windows
Windows
Windows Dev Kit 2023 is an Arm-powered device built by Windows developers for Windows developers. Everything you need to develop Windows apps for Arm, on Arm. Powerful AI. All on one device.
Starting now developers can build, run, and test Windows apps for Arm on a single compact device
With Windows Dev Kit 2023, developers will be able to bring their entire app development process onto one compact device, giving them everything they need to build Windows apps for Arm, on Arm. The Windows Dev Kit 2023, powered by the Snapdragon® 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform and utilizing the Qualcomm® Neural Processing SDK, makes it easy for developers to leverage the platform’s advanced AI capabilities to deliver best-in-class Windows user experiences. This device sports 32 GB RAM and 512 GB fast storage, along with multiple ports: built-in Wi-Fi 6, physical ethernet, 3x USB-A and 2x USB-C, and a Mini Display port for easy and flexible connectivity to your devices, displays and networks. You can also drive up to 3 external monitors simultaneously, including 2 at 4K 60Hz which provides all the screen real estate that most developers need. on how to set up your device.Delivering NPU powered AI capabilities in your apps without compromising performance
In addition to enjoying a simplified development process for Arm, developers can now bring AI enhanced experiences into their apps powered by the NPU. Windows Dev Kit 2023 enables developers to build apps that unlock the power of the NPU hardware to accelerate AI/ML workloads delivering AI-enhanced features & experiences without compromising app performance. You can get started now and access the power of the NPU through the open source and cross-platform ONNX Runtime inference engine, making it easy to run AI/ML models from popular machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow. To learn more, see our page with . One of the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) moved their AI models to run on the Windows Dev Kit 2023 NPU and witnessed incredible performance – On certain models, the NPU is about 80-90 times faster than CPU and about 20 times faster than GPU – leaving the CPU to perform the logical tasks it is intended to do.We are beyond excited that some of the ISVs had an opportunity to run and test their apps on Windows Dev Kit 2023.
You can learn about some of their experiences below:- “Compiling natively to Arm worked very well. The Windows Dev Kit 2023 is an absolutely great machine for end users due to low power and low heat. We leave it running 24/7 and it runs cool.” - Mike Rozhdestvenskii, Director of Software Engineering at Developer Express
- "Performance with Volterra has been refreshingly fast. We have run Actipro’s x86-based product installers, and they all worked. Our WPF and WinForms controls all work well with no changes, even the ‘API-heavy’ ones, as does all test collateral." - Boyd Patterson, Senior Software Engineer, Actipro Software
- “The Volterra devices are neat and powerful, ideal for us to test our market-leading anti-piracy and anti-cheat game security technologies. They’re also very quiet, and they just work out of the box.” - Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto
- “I’m using the Volterra device at my home office at the moment. So far it’s been a nice experience; it is impressively fast, doesn’t slow down while testing our product with Windows on Arm collateral.” - Adam Barton, Member of Technical Staff
- “So far things have been really great. Volterra is running incredibly faster than the previous Arm based Windows machine we've been using with our LLVM and MySQL workload. It is a very light, efficient and powerful device.” - Niyas Sait, Technical Lead for Windows on Arm Project at Linaro
- “The Volterra device was easy to set up. We are using them as a pseudo dev & debug environment and have found them to be really solid dev machines.” - Ryan Butterworth, Manager, Security Engineering at Riot Games
- “We’ve been running emulation on Volterra, and in native Arm64, everything runs much faster.” - Konstantin Bulenkov, Project Manager at JetBrains
- “I use Volterra primarily for remote desktop connecting, and remote debugging on it works well. I’m enjoying the 32GB of RAM and storage on a compact device. It is substantially faster than the previous Arm based Windows machine I was using earlier.” - Koby Kahane, Software Engineer
Arm-native toolchain provides a fast, familiar, and highly productive developer experience
To enhance developer productivity, we have made great progress delivering on the commitments we made at Build in May 2022 to launch a comprehensive native toolchain for Arm native apps. We have released previews of the following and many of these will be generally available by the end of the year.- Previews of IDEs (Visual Studio 2022 17.4),
- Tools & Runtimes (Windows App SDK with native Arm support),
- Libraries (VC++ Runtime), Toolchain (.NET7)
Available Now:
- .NET Framework 4.8.1 with the Windows 11 2022 Update so the large ecosystem of .NET Framework apps can also run natively on Arm64.
- Cloud services (Azure VMs)
- Arm64EC
Visual Studio 2022 17.4 now runs natively on Arm dramatically improving performance
We are committed to delivering continuous innovation to our developer community and have heard developers say, “Not being able to run Visual Studio natively on Arm is a big roadblock.” Over the last three months, we have delivered monthly preview releases of the Arm native Visual Studio 2022 17.4. This version includes support for the following:- Desktop workloads (C++ and C#)
- Windows SDK and Windows App SDK components (Win UI).
- Web, UWP, Node.js and Game Development workloads.
.NET 7 closes the gap between x64 and Arm64 delivering functional parity and improved performance for Arm
With .NET 7 we have made several improvements for Arm in the areas of functional parity and performance. .NET 6 had some features that worked on x64 but not Arm64, with .NET 7, and we are excited that we closed this gap for our developers by adding support for ASP.NET Core Module (ANCM) so ASP.NET Core apps can use IIS on Arm64 in addition to Kestrel server. To boost performance, we have added vendor-specific optimizations so your apps run well on a variety of Arm hardware. We have several runtime improvements to targeting server throughput (RPS) and latency. For more information about this see our blog post on . Developers will need to install the toolchain as needed for their workloads on Windows Dev Kit 2023. Some tools and services may require additional licenses, fees, or both. More apps, tools, frameworks, and packages are being ported to natively target Windows on Arm and will be arriving over the coming months. In the meantime, thanks to Windows 11’s powerful emulation technology, developers will be able to run many unmodified x64 and x86 apps and tools on their Windows Dev Kit.New Azure VMs featuring Ampere Altra Arm-based processors deliver a cost-effective and power-efficient option
Many developers today run workloads and execute builds and tests in the cloud. Developers can now take advantage of the recently introduced Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. The new Azure VMs are now generally available and support various Linux OS distributions in addition to the Insider Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise Windows. about Azure’s Arm-based VMs. More details on hosting and running Azure DevOps and GitHub CI/CD workloads will be shared in the coming months. Stay tuned!A growing Arm ecosystem...
We have ported several 1p Apps over to Arm including a few below to provide better native performance.- Microsoft Teams
- Microsoft 365
- Microsoft Edge
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE)
- OneDrive
- Creativity & Collaboration apps - Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Zoom
- Printing – HP Smart Universal Print Driver
- Security solutions – Crowdstrike Falcon, Panda Security, ESET Endpoint Antivirus, Sophos Intercept X, NetWitness XDR
- VPN products – Palo Alto Networks Global Protect, Cisco Anyconnect, F5 Big-IP Edge Client, Ivanti Pulse Secure, NetMotion VPN, OpenVPN
- Benchmarking solutions – PassMark PerformanceTest, Nexthink Collector, 3Dmark Night Raid & Wild Life