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

Enlarge / Microsoft's Project Volterra is an Arm-powered developer desktop launching later this year. This image depicts two Volterra boxes stacked on top of one another. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows on Arm is arguably as successful as it has ever been-you can buy multiple Arm-powered Windows laptops and tablets, and those devices can run nearly the entire range of available Windows apps thanks to x86-to-Arm code translation. That said, Windows on Arm still accounts for just a fraction of the entire Windows ecosystem, and native Arm apps for the platform are still relatively rare.

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.

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