Microsoft readies Windows on Arm dev kits with Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC for US$599

Announced back in May this year as Project Volterra, Microsoft’s latest developer kit for Windows on Arm applications is now available for US$599 and the full spec sheet is revealed, as well. It comes in a mini PC form-factor with a 8 x 6 x 1.1 inches case made of 20% plastic collected from oceans and it weighs around 2 lbs. Powering the system is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC coupled with 32 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and a 512 GB NVMe SSD.

The new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC packs four of Arm’s Cortex-X1 performance cores combined with four Cortex-A78 cores running at almost 3 GHz, and it also integrates an Adreno 690 GPU along with a powerful 29 TOPs NPU that is said to improve performance by up to 90 times versus CPU cores in some AI-enabled applications. Fast connectivity is ensured via a Wi-Fi 6 + BT 5.1 card and port selection includes 2x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, 3x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, MiniDP video out and 1 Gb Ethernet jack. Microsoft also provides an sTPM security module.

Developers can get to work right away, since Microsoft is including a Windows 11 Pro copy pre-installed with Visual Studio, VSCode and Windows Subsystem for Linux. The initial Spring announcement was touting a stacking feature that would allow multiple dev kits to be interconnected in order to provide more compute power, but the updated specs mention that only two devices can be stacked, even though the promo video shows three. For now, the dev kit can be ordered from the US, UK, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany and Japan.

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