Microsoft announces Windows Dev Kit 2023 PC - ARM64 based PC for Devs

[GoodBytes]

Designed to help developers to port or make new applications under Windows 11 for ARM64 based CPUs, Microsoft releases a new powerful PC.

Teased back at BUILD event earlier the year, this PC is designed to offer a more affordable powerful system for developer over the costly Surface Pro X.

 

 

Powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC, it features:

• 32GB LPDDR4x RAM
• 512GB NVMe SSD
• Wi-Fi 6
• Bluetooth 5.1
• Windows 11 Pro
• Heatsink and fan to maximize the SoC performance, and provide continuous high performance.
• Stackable design
• 90W power supply included

This small compact system features:

• 3x USB Type-A
• 2x USB-C with Video out HBR3
• Mini-Display with HBR2
• Ethernet

(Can drive 3 displays at once)

 

Interestingly enough, besides its power button, it also features:

• UEFI Button, which allows the system to boot straight to the UEFI of the device.
• Boot from USB device Button, which allows a dev to start the system and boot to connected bootable USB Flash drive.

The system is available for purchase to all through Microsoft online Store in the following regions:

Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

 

Price:

There is only 1 configuration:

• US: $599 USD
• Canada: $799 CAD

You can get it now in the US, date varies for other regions. Canada is Oct 27, so just in a few days.

 

Quotes

Quote

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. 

 

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. 

 

Microsoft also mentions that the following dev tools at available to developers have been ported to ARM64 for the best performance (avoids going through the x86/x86-64 translation layer)

• Visual Studio 2022 17.4 IDE
• Windows App SDK
• VC++ Runtime
• .NET7
• NET Framework 4.8.1
• Windows Subsystem for Android
• Windows Subsystem for Linux

Microsoft highlights the following applications who have been ported to native ARM64 for delivering the best performance out of ARM based systems running Windows 11:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom
• HP Smart Universal Print Driver
• Crowdstrike Falcon
• Panda Security
• ESET Endpoint Antivirus
• Sophos Intercept X
• NetWitness XDR  
• Palo Alto Networks Global Protect
• Cisco Anyconnect
• F5 Big-IP Edge Client
• Ivanti Pulse Secure
• NetMotion VPN
• OpenVPN 
• PassMark PerformanceTest
• Nexthink Collector
• 3Dmark Night Raid & Wild Life
• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE)  
• Microsoft Edge
• OneDrive 
• Microsoft 365 (aka: Office 365)
• Microsoft Teams
• Zoom

(VLC is missing from the list, but it exists... Stange, maybe it's not a fully ported... dunno)

 

Reminder, Windows 11 not only brings x86-64 instruction translation support (aka: 64-bit applications for Intel/AMD CPUs) but also supports partially converted applications via Arm64EC technology, as Microsoft calls it. Allowing a native ARM64 application for Windows 11 on ARM to use x86 or x86-64 libraries, a feature missing in Windows 10 on ARM which made it difficult for developers to port their applications as not all libraries that they use are availible yet.

 

Source: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/10/24/available-today-windows-dev-kit-2023-aka-project-volterra/

 

It is very nice that Microsoft finally has converted its dev tools for native ARM64 architecture and is now offering a more decently priced system that developers (or anyone really) to use to help develop /port and test their application. It took the company a very long time to get there, but they finally arrived. It is clear that Microsoft is putting focus on ARM based system. Having more apps available for that architecture will only help the adoption rate of ARM based systems. It will open doors for lower-end SoC being an option (as users won't have to worry too much about support, and not have their experience massacred going through a software translation layer)

 

Over time, this will also help Rasbery Pi owners who want to run Windows 11 on it a bit, of course driver support is their biggest hurtle that they are facing, but sure sounds like a fun weekend project. https://worproject.com/

 

[DrMacintosh]

And so it begins. The ARM race. 

 

Spoiler

Also funny how Microsoft advertises stickability, a joke people made about the future Mac Pro before the 2019 model was released. 

 

[Arika]

I think what windows on ARM needs is someone who isn't qualcomm.

[suicidalfranco]

just shut down WoA already. It's not going to happen, accept it and move on MS

[Fasterthannothing]

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

just shut down WoA already. It's not going to happen, accept it and move on MS

Why? That's absurd ARM is the future why not take advantage of highly efficient processors that can fit into mobile devices and sip power 

[Forbidden Wafer]

30 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Why? That's absurd ARM is the future why not take advantage of highly efficient processors that can fit into mobile devices and sip power 

Try using a Qualcomm-equipped Windows computer and tell me what you think about "highly efficient processors".

[AlTech]

Not a bad spec for $599. If I had a hole burning in my pocket this would be of great interest.

 

Though I think Microsoft should have also released a model closer to $299 or $399.

[DrMacintosh]

1 hour ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Try using a Qualcomm-equipped Windows computer and tell me what you think about "highly efficient processors".

That statement is exactly why MS is trying to make ARM a thing. They need devs to start making their software run on ARM. 

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Try using a Qualcomm-equipped Windows computer and tell me what you think about "highly efficient processors".

It runs fine on my Snapdragon 810 with 3GB of RAM device. I have Win11 22H2 on it.

 

[LAwLz]

On 10/25/2022 at 5:06 AM, GoodBytes said:

It runs fine on my Snapdragon 810 with 3GB of RAM device. I have Win11 22H2 on it.

I think your bar for "runs fine" is a lot lower than most peoples'.

 

The fact of the matter is that the Qualcomm chips performs poorly when compared to competing products. They are slightly more competitive now, but still behind.

The chip in this dev kit are using CPU cores that are almost 2 generations behind now. It's using X1 cores when X3 cores have already been announced. They can't be releasing a product now that is based on over 2.5 year old architectures. 

 

 

What Microsoft needs to do is:

1) Rewrite their entire x86 translation/emulation stack to make use of newer instructions. The reason why Rosetta 2 is so high performant is because it takes advantage of Armv8.3 instructions for using a memory model consistent with x86. Things like LDAPR. The issue now is that Microsoft designed their translation layer for chips like the Snapdragon 810 and it does not seem like they have updated it since. They need to start from scratch using modern instructions.

 

2) Actually release a good SoC. The chips Qualcomm are releasing are quite frankly garbage. They are not even trying, as evident by for example this new PC that is running an old SoC, with even older CPU cores in it.

[suicidalfranco]

6 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Why? That's absurd ARM is the future why not take advantage of highly efficient processors that can fit into mobile devices and sip power 

cause WoA is a joke reaching meme levels, has only delivered overpriced bad products that don't stand a leg against their x86 counterparts. 

Windows' one advantage against all other OS is its legacy support, remove that, and you may as well just pick a Mac at least there you get an actually decent SoC compared to the crapshoot Qualcomm has been trying to stick to the wall.

And let's not even speak about how bad MS's translation layer for 32 bit x86 programs is.

[AlexGoesHigh]

9 hours ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Try using a Qualcomm-equipped Windows computer and tell me what you think about "highly efficient processors".

The problem itself is Qualcomm, the guy your replying to is right, ARM has become too important to not support it.

 

Qualcomm current chip lineup is trash and IMO it has been for a long time now, and also, by extension the entire ARM chip makers ecosystem aren't great either because everyone except Apple still use their designs, i guess that's the problem when you design stuff and make all the involved parties happy with each one having different priorities of what's needed.

 

Still ARM can't be ignored and Microsoft dropping ARM support would be stupid, with Windows 11 it reached a point where it can be useful for office/browser/whatever-non-demanding-task for most people if it weren't for Qualcomm crappy chips, i have setup a W11 VM on my M1 pro macbook and i shit you not it can run in a usable state a 20 year old Java program i have to use for work which is on top of a fuck ton of layers in order to reach the CPU because it goes:

 

The app -> 32bit x86 Java -> MS x86 to ARM64 layer -> Windows -> Hypervisor -> MacOS -> CPU.

 

That is wild and it works and with more work it can only get better, i just hope that the Nuvia chip its way more powerful that current ARM cores, once common ARM chips reach the M1 performance line, MS keeps optimizing their ARM build and MS also starts supporting other ARM vendors, we're gonna have way more options that Intel and AMD for low power computers.

 

TL;DR the ARM potential is there, Qualcomm is just the worst company to bring it to the masses outside the Apple ecosystem.

[Doobeedoo]

I take it they're slowly preparing getting devs and all, but need to see what Nuvia will bring matching Apple M series becaus anything else now is dogshit. 

We'll see in time. Having a thin and light APU with Nuvia SoC laptop would be awesome though.

[Forbidden Wafer]

59 minutes ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

The problem itself is Qualcomm, the guy your replying to is right, ARM has become too important to not support it.

The problem is they make cheap processors, and only cheap processors.

By cheap I mean small ones that they can have decent margins.
Good ARM processors, just like good x86 processors, need to be big, with tons of execution units, large caches, etc.

[AlexGoesHigh]

30 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

The problem is they make cheap processors, and only cheap processors.

By cheap I mean small ones that they can have decent margins.
Good ARM processors, just like good x86 processors, need to be big, with tons of execution units, large caches, etc.

Exactly, i hope at some point some other ARM vendors start working with MS so their chips can work with Windows, if Windows ARM dies is all because of Qualcomm.

[strajk-]

Well it is just a DevKit, so it is not aimed towards the generic consumer, hope build times aren't too atrocious on it.

However, if at the current state a consumer product were to be released, it would frankly be garbage, Qualcomm has been milking the market dry thanks to a monopoly in ARM, and Microsoft like in Windows 10 for ARM will most likely have a crippling OS due to outdated Instruction Sets and old SoC's...

 

Who knows, maybe in 5 years it will be worth it, most importantly we need major competition in the ARM space to leapfrog innovation and progression.

[ZetZet]

17 hours ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

Exactly, i hope at some point some other ARM vendors start working with MS so their chips can work with Windows, if Windows ARM dies is all because of Qualcomm.

What's the point of ARM on Windows? People kept saying laptops for "efficiency", but then the largest power draw in laptops has been the display for a good while now. 

 

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-6800U-Efficiency-Review-Zen3-beats-Intel-Alder-Lake.623763.0.html 

 

x86 is matching or beating Apple magic sauce M1 and that's on an older/cheaper process node. 

 

When AMD starts shipping Zen4 on 5nm to laptops they will be faster and more efficient than Apple M2.

[AlexGoesHigh]

2 hours ago, ZetZet said:

What's the point of ARM on Windows? People kept saying laptops for "efficiency", but then the largest power draw in laptops has been the display for a good while now. 

 

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-6800U-Efficiency-Review-Zen3-beats-Intel-Alder-Lake.623763.0.html 

 

x86 is matching or beating Apple magic sauce M1 and that's on an older/cheaper process node. 

 

When AMD starts shipping Zen4 on 5nm to laptops they will be faster and more efficient than Apple M2.

For me it's just that it will allow more vendors in the ecosystem, it's good that AMD and Intel compete with each other now but breaking a duopoly is even better.

[hishnash]

22 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Nuvia SoC laptop would be awesome though.

Currently venting Nuvia have been working on is server cpus with high core count very small cores, basicly cpus with many many many tiny little cores.  This is great for the data centre, as you can put a LOT of lower cpu intensive clients on a small space and draw a small amount of power.    These chips are very different from what apple have been making. 

 

 

On 10/25/2022 at 7:42 PM, LAwLz said:

They need to start from scratch using modern instructions.

Its not just instructions, the key trick that apple have with Roseta2 is that it is not realy an emulation layer but rather a static transcompiler, on first launch it reads the binary and creates an ARM binary that is caches to disk and your Mac then just runs this no interpreting needed (in most cases).  Doing this on windows with legacy apps will be harder, apple for a long time have been pushing devs to use the (optional) hardened runtime, this comes with a load of nice things but also some restrictions when it comes to using JIT, these restrictions do not stop you using JIT but make it a little more complex... But it just so turns out that the limitations that the hardened runtime put in place on JIT make it simple (and faster) for rosseta2 to deal with apps that have JIT.

[Doobeedoo]

3 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Currently venting Nuvia have been working on is server cpus with high core count very small cores, basicly cpus with many many many tiny little cores.  This is great for the data centre, as you can put a LOT of lower cpu intensive clients on a small space and draw a small amount of power.    These chips are very different from what apple have been making. 

Right, at least what's said, that they're to bring their chips to PCs/laptops by end of next year, we'll see though. I'm curious how they'll compare to Apple A and M series, especially for larger devices scaled too.

[LAwLz]

 

 

5 hours ago, ZetZet said:

What's the point of ARM on Windows? People kept saying laptops for "efficiency", but then the largest power draw in laptops has been the display for a good while now. 

 

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-6800U-Efficiency-Review-Zen3-beats-Intel-Alder-Lake.623763.0.html 

 

x86 is matching or beating Apple magic sauce M1 and that's on an older/cheaper process node. 

 

When AMD starts shipping Zen4 on 5nm to laptops they will be faster and more efficient than Apple M2.

That article shows the M1 Pro having a 219 "points per watt" and the Ryzen 6800U having a "points per watt" score of 78.3.

The M1 is almost 3 times as efficient (x2.8 to be more precise) as the 6800U in those tests.

 

Things are a lot closer in the multithreaded tests, but it also seems like NoteBookCheck is just assuming the TDP is the same as the power consumption. Maybe I am misreading the article, but if that's what they are doing then their results are not exactly accurate. 

 

They are also doing a bit of funky stuff like running Cinebench through Rosetta rather than native, which is the only test where the Ryzen chip manages to beat the M1.

 

 

I'd take those results with a shovel or two of salt. 

Sadly I don't think we will get some decent power measurements for these new chips since Andrei left Anandtech. 

 

 

22 hours ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

Exactly, i hope at some point some other ARM vendors start working with MS so their chips can work with Windows, if Windows ARM dies is all because of Qualcomm.

Rumors has it that Microsoft signed an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm. The reason why Windows only works on Qualcomm SOCs is because Microsoft programmed it that way on behalf of Qualcomm.

Once that contract ends we will probably get chips from other companies like MediaTek and maybe Samsung.

 

The problem with that is that those will probably suck too. The core architectures that arm (the company, not the instruction set) publish and that everyone except Apple uses is nowhere near as good as what Apple does.

[LAwLz]

57 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Currently venting Nuvia have been working on is server cpus with high core count very small cores, basicly cpus with many many many tiny little cores.  This is great for the data centre, as you can put a LOT of lower cpu intensive clients on a small space and draw a small amount of power.    These chips are very different from what apple have been making. 

Qualcomm have said that they will release an SoC for Windows PCs with NUVIA-developed cores in 2023.

We will probably get an announcement about it later this year. After Qualcomm bought NUVIA, they made a press release stating that they would release an SoC for "performance ultraportable laptops" using that design. So it seems like we will get a consumer grade SoC before we see NUVIA cores in servers.

 

NUVIA's development target for their CPU cores was 40-50% higher single threaded performance compared to Zen 2 (with Zen 2 set to a power budget of about 12 watts per core). That to me sounds like a high end CPU core. 

Put 4-10 of those on an SoC and it will probably be able to compete with the M1 and M2 lineup pretty well. Assuming NUVIA reaches their performance targets of course.

 

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

Its not just instructions, the key trick that apple have with Roseta2 is that it is not realy an emulation layer but rather a static transcompiler, on first launch it reads the binary and creates an ARM binary that is caches to disk and your Mac then just runs this no interpreting needed (in most cases).  Doing this on windows with legacy apps will be harder, apple for a long time have been pushing devs to use the (optional) hardened runtime, this comes with a load of nice things but also some restrictions when it comes to using JIT, these restrictions do not stop you using JIT but make it a little more complex... But it just so turns out that the limitations that the hardened runtime put in place on JIT make it simple (and faster) for rosseta2 to deal with apps that have JIT.

I am fairly sure Windows does the same thing (translates in the background and saves that to a cache, before the program gets launched). It's just that the arm instructions they end up with requires more processing because of things like memory checks which wouldn't be necessary if they translated to more modern instructions.

[Sauron]

On 10/24/2022 at 10:08 PM, GoodBytes said:

Microsoft also mentions that the following dev tools at available to developers have been ported to ARM64 for the best performance (avoids going through the x86/x86-64 translation layer)

• Visual Studio 2022 17.4 IDE
• Windows App SDK
• VC++ Runtime
• .NET7
• NET Framework 4.8.1

It blows my mind that up until now this wasn't the case

[ZetZet]

25 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

That article shows the M1 Pro having a 219 "points per watt" and the Ryzen 6800U having a "points per watt" score of 78.3.

The M1 is almost 3 times as efficient (x2.8 to be more precise) as the 6800U in those tests.

I mean you kind of started reading it and then you gave up and claimed victory. Apple M1 doesn't have HT. So Apple M1 single core is a lot fucking bigger than Zen3 core when it comes to single threaded workloads. That's purely a design decision and doesn't have much to do with x86 or ARM. You have to look at overall performance when the CPU starts to hit power limits. 

 

Like I said if they were both using 5nm it would be splitting hairs, Zen4 most likely wins in multi-threaded applications. There are no big victories for anyone in terms of architecture.

[hishnash]

11 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Right, at least what's said, that they're to bring their chips to PCs/laptops by end of next year, we'll see though. I'm curious how they'll compare to Apple A and M series, especially for larger devices scaled too.

The cores they have are not even low end phone compatible. They are great for servers don't get me wrong but in any single core task not there for even phones.  They will need to build an entier new core. And as they include ex-apple staffers they will need to be extra careful to ensure it does not copy any of the apple internals that these staff members might know otherwise it will be trivial for apple to block the chip from sale, that is likly why they went in the direction of server chips as they know this was not going to bring in the lawers and is an area were there is lots of room to invoate.