Microsoft’s “Project Volterra” becomes an Arm-powered mini PC with 32GB RAM

Earlier this year, Microsoft Announced which would release new hardware to encourage more developers to start using and supporting the Arm version of Windows. Dubbed “Project Volterra,” all we knew at the time was that it would use an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and NVMe-based storage, support at least two monitors, and have a decent number of ports.

Today, Microsoft is Volterra goes out into the world puttingcomplete with a snappy new name: the Windows 2023 Development Kit. The 2023 Dev Kit will use a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, essentially the same chip as the Microsoft SQ3 in the new 5G version of surface pro 9—plus 512GB of storage and a whopping 32GB of RAM for the surprisingly low price of $599.

We don’t know exactly how fast the 8cx Gen 3 will be (Qualcomm says CPU performance is “up to 85 percent faster” than the 8cx Gen 2, which would put it somewhere below but within striking distance of the modern Core i5 laptop CPU). But 512GB of storage and 32GB of memory should make the 2023 Dev Kit useful as a development and test environment.

Microsoft says that the box can connect to up to three monitors simultaneously using its two USB-C ports and mini DisplayPort and that up to two of those displays can be 4K displays running at 60 Hz. Three USB-A ports, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 round out the connectivity options.

Dev Kit 2023 continues Microsoft’s effort to run the entire Windows development toolchain natively on Arm hardware without the performance penalty imposed by the x86-to-Arm code translation that Windows uses to maintain compatibility. with the largest universe of Windows applications. Visual Studio, both old and new versions of the .NET Framework, Visual C++ Runtime, and other Windows development software are now available as native Arm versions, or as native Arm previews generally released later this year.

The latest officially sanctioned Arm PC for Windows developers is ECS LIVA QC170 $219 from last year (another name that rolls off the tongue). It was much cheaper than the 2023 Dev Kit, but it was also much less powerful, with a weak snapdragon 7c processor, only 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of slow eMMC storage. I’ve used the QC170 and it works, but it’s not nice. In everyday use, the Dev Kit 2023 should at least feel like a modern mid-range PC.