Voltora under Microsoft Arm, a mini Windows PC ready

During its built-in conference, Microsoft released a new developer kit called Voldera to encourage people to convert their applications to Arm Architecture.

Microsoft’s built-in event is generally dedicated to developers and software, but this year the manufacturer released a new mini PC. This Voldera project is original because the system embeds a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm into a mini box. An arm architecture here is not really for the general public, but for developers switching from x86 applications to arm.

New hope?

This is not Microsoft’s first attempt at this area, as the Surface Pro X has already tried this tutorial without much success. Some applications were running under the arm at the time and the emulation of the x86 and x64 applications was not very smooth.

Therefore, Microsoft wants to follow in Apple’s footsteps, converting all its Intel processors to its new M1s within two years, with the successes we know in terms of power consumption and performance. Microsoft’s strategy will be different, however, with the idea of ​​not abandoning the classic configurations and the Windows / Intel, Windows / AMD relationship (for now).

Some details are given in this Voldera project, except for some photos and its attachments of the Mac mini M1’s Windows parallel box. The Snapdragon model has not been officially released, but we can expect it to be the 8cx Gen 3 offered by Qualcomm in December 2021, which promises better performance than the previous generation.

However, it will be difficult to compete with the latest chips from Apple, AMD and Intel. All of these are directly on the arm-mounted system, especially since there is an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) chip dedicated to AI.

In any case, we hope that this project will allow Microsoft to accelerate the development of its applications under the Arm, in order to deliver portable PCs (and other mini PCs) to the general public up to the side of performance and autonomy. The delay will be complicated to catch up with, Apple has a good start right now, and if the M2 chips are announced soon, maybe June 6th at WWDC.