Microsoft announces a brand-new ARM-powered desktop PC and ARM-native dev tools

At its Build developer conference Tuesday, Microsoft made a few announcements aimed at bolstering Windows on Arm. The first is Project Volterra, a Microsoft-branded mini-desktop computer powered by an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. More relevant for developers who already have Arm hardware, Volterra will be accompanied by a fully Arm-native suite of developer tools.

According to Microsoft's blog post, the company will be releasing ARM-native versions of Visual Studio 2022 and VSCode, Visual C++, Modern .NET 6, the classic .NET framework, Windows Terminal, and both the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android. Arm-native versions of these apps will allow developers to run them without the performance penalty associated with translating x86 code to run on Arm devices-especially helpful given that Arm Windows devices usually don't have much performance to spare.

I actually wouldn't mind one of these as an actual product for regular end users. Windows on ARM needs a big push, and while I'm not sure these announcements constitute such a big push, it's at least something.