At Apple, we knew the Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a Mac mini that looks like frankenstein creature with its innards pulled from an iPad Pro. It allowed developers to optimize their first applications for the M1 chip.
During his conference BuildMicrosoft takes up the same idea (quite common in the small world of computing) of a device intended for developers, with a view similar to that of Apple: designing and adapting applications to the Arm architecture… but specialized apps for the cloud and artificial intelligence.
Microsoft has worked with its partner Qualcomm on a box called Project Volterra. Inside is a Snapdragon chip lined with an NPU, a neural computing unit. The device will be available later this year, as will the native Arm64 version of Visual Studio and .NET support.
Introducing Project Volterra… #Rad pic.twitter.com/llU73ih5A8
– Panos Panay (@panos_panay) May 24, 2022
Perhaps Volterra will be more successful than last year’s development kit, also designed in partnership between Microsoft and Qualcomm, and which was intended to be used to create Arm64 apps for Windows. We haven’t seen much excitement around this project.
Microsoft and Qualcomm will launch a Windows ARM development kit
