Windows Dev Kit 2023

The new Windows Dev Kit 2023 is designed to help developers create Windows applications for Arm much more easily and efficiently, this new device is also called “Project Volterra” at Build in May 2022.

This new device, Windows Dev Kit 2023 is now available for developers in 8 countries around the world, which are Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Create, run and test

Now developers will be able to bring the entire application development process to a compact device by giving them the choice of tools to create Windows applications for Arm, on Arm. This device is powered by the Snapdragon® 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform and using the Qualcomm® Neural Processing SDK, all of this gives developers the power to take advantage of the advanced AI capabilities that the platform gives them to have the best Windows user experiences.

The Windows Dev Kit 2023 has 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB of fast storage, as well as some ports such as integrated Wi-Fi 6, physical ethernet, 3x USB-A and 2x USB-C, and a Mini port. Display, which allows you to have an easier and more flexible connection with all your devices, screens and even networks. Plus, you can control up to 3 external monitors simultaneously, including 2 at 4K 60 Hz, giving you all the screen real estate you need to work better and develop more easily.

NPU powered AI capabilities in your apps 

This appliance helps developers build applications that unlock the power of NPU hardware, thereby accelerating AI/ML workloads, thus not compromising application performance and performance.

You can access the NPU via the open source, cross-platform ONNX Runtime inference engine, making it much easier from machine learning frameworks, for example PyTorch and TensorFlow.

We can also find that on certain models, the NPU is between 80 and 90 times faster than the CPU and 20 times faster than the GPU, likewise the Luminar Neo team at Skylum made some AI models run on the Windows Dev Kit 2023 NPU, giving them better performance that favored the execution of tasks.

Some of the ISVs were able to get the opportunity to run and test their applications on Windows Dev Kit 2023, which is very exciting for the company.

Here you can find some of the experiences and testimonials:

• “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, he is the 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.
• “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.
• “We’ve been running emulation on Volterra, and in native Arm64, everything runs much faster.” – Konstantin Bulenkov, Project Manager at JetBrains.

Fast, familiar, and highly productive developer experience  

Some of the advances have been published and these are the ones that can be found generally available at 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) 

These are some of which are already available:

• .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 running natively on Arm, Arm-native Visual Studio 2022 17.4 Monthly Previews have been delivered as the focus is on innovating and delivering better performance to users. 

Also added support for developer productivity features like Edit and Continue/Hot Reload, as well as some profiling tools. Visual Studio 2022 17.4 and .NET 7 will be available soon.

This release 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

Some improvements have been included for Arm in the areas of performance and functional parity, previously there were features in x64 but not in Arm64, support for ASP.NET Core Module (ANCM) can now be added, and applications can use IIS in Arm64 next to the Kestrel server. Vendor-specific optimizations and runtime improvements for Arm64 performance have also been implemented  in .NET 7.

New Azure VMs featuring Ampere Altra Arm-based processors

Newly introduced Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere Altra Arm based processor can now be leveraged for better, much more cost effective and power efficient experiences for developers and can be found on operating systems such as Linux, Windows Insider Preview 11 Pro and Enterprise Windows.

1p to Arm apps that are included for better native performance:

• Microsoft Teams 
• Microsoft 365 
• Microsoft Edge 
• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE)  
• OneDrive  

Applications ported to Arm with native support for Windows on Arm:

• 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 

Assistance porting your applications to Arm64

With the App Assure service you allow your Windows applications to work on Arm and in case you have problems with application compatibility or a technical block in the migration of your applications with Windows Dev Kit 2023, you can contact the App service directly Assure. By clicking here you can visit the App Assure page.