Microsoft’s new mini PC for developing ARM applications

The ARM chips at the heart of smartphones and most tablets allow devices equipped with them to take advantage of good performance, both in terms of computation and autonomy. And those chips don’t stop at these product lines, as Apple has seen with the Mac M1 and M2. Microsoft launched itself very early in the field with Windows RT that failed, but that didn’t stop the company from coming back for it.

Suitable device for ARM development

The last confirmation date is two weeks ago, with Surface Pro 9 display Available in x86 version (12th generation Intel Core) and ARM version with the SQ3 chip developed by Microsoft, based on the Snapdragon 8x Gen 3 chip. The publisher has always developed a version of Windows suitable for ARM-based PCs.

But to push ahead with the adoption of ARM chips, Microsoft must now convince developers to get started. This is why they are releasing the “Windows 2023 SDK” which will allow them to ” assemble everything [leur] Application development process (…) for Windows for ARM “.

This 960g mini PC retails for €699 and features Qualcomm’s popular Snapdragon 8x Gen 3 chip, 32GB LPDDR4x RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, Adreno GPU, and five USB-C (USB3 .2 Gen 2), Ethernet port, mini-DisplayPort port, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2. We’re far from the player’s machine, but that’s not the point! The chip integrates its own Neural Engine for all applications requiring artificial intelligence.

Most importantly, Microsoft provides all of its native development tools in ARM: Visual Studio 2022 17.4, .NET 7, Visual C++ previews, and the Windows App SDK are also offered.