Project Volterra is Microsoft’s First ARM-Based Desktop PC

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• Project Volterra
• Windows 11

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• bdollerup

  Premium Member

  27 May, 2022 - 2:55 pm

  <p>Can we lay off the mac mini thing any time soon. It’s a dev box. Microsoft want developers to develop applications for ARM and Azure and they need something to work with…. </p>

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• wright_is

  Premium Member

  28 May, 2022 - 3:37 am

  <p>I agree, but, on the other hand, the Mac mini is the benchmark on the desktop at the moment. They use very little power, yet provide amazing levels of performance. My Mac mini "feels" faster than my Ryzen 1700 desktop, yet uses less than a 5th of the power to achieve that performance.</p><p><br></p><p>That means that whenever Microsoft release a new ARM based device, it will be placed against the Mac mini (if not the Studio) for comparison. With the previous ARM developer box, it was plainly obvious, from the Snapdragon 7CX processor and its, relatively, cheap price, that it was purely for developers to test on and that it was designed to be the "minimum", so that developers would learn what they needed to optimize, before throwing their software out to the unsuspecting public.</p><p><br></p><p>The Volterra, on the other hand, has been launched with a big fanfare and images that suggest it is a much more powerful device and it looks more like a Mini, in design. It will be interesting to see just how fast it is and whether it lives up to the release hype.</p>

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• Russell Smith

  Premium Member

  28 May, 2022 - 4:26 am

  <p>Volterra is rumoured to likely use the <span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Snapdragon 8cx Gen3, which as I understand, is leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor. And fan cooling should also help. But there’s still a significant gap between the 8cx Gen3 and M1 chips. I think it will be a couple more years before we see anything from Qualcomm that can match Apple.</span></p>

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• wp7mango

  28 May, 2022 - 5:16 am

  <p>I don’t know, my Mac Mini M1 didn’t exactly wow me from a performance perspective. But I guess everyone has different experiences based on their usage.</p><p><br></p><p>I’ve sold it now and will probably get an AMD powered mini PC instead. </p>

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• nbplopes

  31 May, 2022 - 10:33 am

  <p>What was the name of that XBOX One game that would do amazing things given that it offloaded processing to the Cloud in real time? All to justify that XBOX One was slower than the PS4 but had the Cloud bla blabkabka.</p><p><br></p><p>This seams to be the same kind of marketing strategy. MS has no serious proposal for ARM … their implementation is years behind the competition … so the Cloud blablabla.</p><p><br></p><p>Anyway … with the right price …. Very cheap … it might make a nice “dumb” terminal. Mind you … no developer actually work on dumb terminal so this product looks weird … just weird.</p>

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• jackwagon

  Premium Member

  03 June, 2022 - 6:03 pm

  <p>The game was Crackdown 3, I believe.</p><p><br></p><p>Also, I would hope they actually have a plan for this device. I wonder if we’ll see more devices come out once other companies can make WoA chips.</p>

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