Microsoft announces Project Volterra to breathe life into Windows on Arm

In addition to revealing that Windows 11 users can look forward to installing third-party widgets later this year, Microsoft also used Build 2022 to announce Project Volterra.

Project Volterra is a developer-focused device powered by a Snapdragon processor, which looks remarkably similar to a Mac Mini. Featuring an integrated neural processing unit, the developer device will provide, Microsoft devs, opportunities to explore various AI scenarios.

See also:

• Microsoft announces that third-party widgets are coming to Windows 11 this year
• Microsoft announces that Windows 11 is now ready for (almost) everyone
• Microsoft releases emergency patches for Windows authentication issues

Although Microsoft is yet to give a huge amount of detail about the project, the company says: "We believe in an open hardware ecosystem for Windows giving you more flexibility and more options, and the ability to support a wide range of scenarios. As such, we are always evolving the platform to support new and emerging hardware platforms and technologies, such as GPUs that render an app's user experiences, Wi-Fi and cellular chipsets that ensure devices are always connected, and CPUs including MIPS, x86, Alpha, Itanium, and x64".

It continues:

As we look forward to what is next and how we can further innovate in this space, we are excited to announce Project Volterra, a new device powered by the Snapdragon compute platform. With Project Volterra you will be able to explore many AI scenarios via the new Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit announced today by Qualcomm Technologies.

And because we expect to see NPUs being built into most, if not all, future computing devices, we're going to make it easy for developers to leverage these new capabilities, by baking support for NPUs into the end-to-end Windows platform.

Panos Panay tweeted about the upcoming project, sharing a video showing off the device:

With the warning that "product features are subject to change and may vary by market when the product is released", Microsoft says that it "will share more details at a later date".