Microsoft Volterra (ARM-based mini PC)

Well officially Windows Dev Kit 2023 - but anyone try one yet?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/d/windows-dev-kit-20...

Apparently natively not as snappy as an old M1 Mac Mini running Win ARM under Parallels virtualisation according to this guy on this review.

Still looks interesting.

Edited by Pheasant (Tue 22-Nov-22 22:54:47)

I’m not sure that you are comparing like with like. For $900 you get a Mini with 8GB of RAM as opposed to the Dev Kit with 32GB for $600. They are designed for different purposes. One for video processing, and the like, the other for development. For the latter I’d go for more RAM with a slower processor.

For sure - it’s not Apples for apples 😂- they may be destined for different purposes, but the Mac Mini comparison is an obvious-ish and difficult one to get away from, given the ARM and foot(print)…

The Volterra is a genuinely interesting beast; MS obviously heavily subsidising the price - at £579 here it’s around £200 or so less than a similar footprint Lenovo or Dell micro PC with a 12th gen i5, the same size SSD but half the amount of RAM - I just bought four Lenovo M80q Gen 3’s for £750 a pop so that price point is fresh in my mind.

Baseline Mac Mini with 8GB / 256GB is £700 and double hard-drive or double the memory’s is another £200 on top for each. No aftermarket upgrade possible. Easy money for Apple.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

For sure - it’s not Apples for apples 😂- they may be destined for different purposes, but the Mac Mini comparison is an obvious-ish and difficult one to get away from, given the ARM and foot(print)…

The ARM side of the CPU is similar, but reports are that because the Qualcomm CPU doesn't have the Apple extensions to assist Intel realtime conversion, running x86/64 applications using Win11 for ARM's real time transcoder doesn't compare with Apple's M1/M2 series. So useful if you want to develop for Windows on ARM, cheaper than the ARM version of the Surface Pro 9 but not something to run for mostly running x86/64 applications.

The hardware guys are looking to Qualcomm's future CPU releases as they integrate recent acquisions to see if they can create a similar feature set to M1.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

The ARM side of the CPU is similar, but reports are that because the Qualcomm CPU doesn't have the Apple extensions to assist Intel realtime conversion, running x86/64 applications using Win11 for ARM's real time transcoder doesn't compare with Apple's M1/M2 series.

It isn't just the Apple extensions, the M1 is also 50-60% faster at raw CPU speed (for single threaded tasks). And of course the M1 is two years old now 😉 (and no doubt the Mini will get the M2 soon, 70% faster than the Qualcomm in single core and 50% in multi).

Qualcomm still have some catching up to do.

Yes of that (both outright muscle/performance : / power to punch : / minimal power consumption) there is no doubt that Apple Silicon holds the crown in ARM-land and will do so for the foreseeable.

I can’t see Qualcomm catching up on that respect any time soon.

There are however drawbacks:

1. MacOS is the only real native OS option (I’m kind of discounting Asahi for the time being) on Apple Silicon

2. Running Windows for ARM requires Parallels. That in itself is OK performance-wise generally but doubtless an extra complication and cost. Then there is…

3. Microsoft licensing of WIndows on ARM is “grey” (my spin!) when running on Apple Silicon. Although I do it, I’m no longer a corporate slave so do what I want. But it’s a consideration that has been raised by those folks where legal and compliance rule the roost.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

The ARM side of the CPU is similar, but reports are that because the Qualcomm CPU doesn't have the Apple extensions to assist Intel realtime conversion, running x86/64 applications using Win11 for ARM's real time transcoder doesn't compare with Apple's M1/M2 series.

It isn't just the Apple extensions, the M1 is also 50-60% faster at raw CPU speed (for single threaded tasks). And of course the M1 is two years old now 😉 (and no doubt the Mini will get the M2 soon, 70% faster than the Qualcomm in single core and 50% in multi). Qualcomm still have some catching up to do.

Agreed, but the team (Nuvia) they purchased is ex-Apple engineers whom worked on the M1 and didn't want to stay... probably people whom worked for the previous chip design companies Apple purchased (e.g. PA Semi)

The future is no means clear!

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

2. Running Windows for ARM requires Parallels. That in itself is OK performance-wise generally but doubtless an extra complication and cost. Then there is…

Or VMWare Fusion 13, which has now been released and fully supports the M1 and running ARM based operating systems: https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion.html
Parallels itself has a 'grey' feature where it automatically downloads Windows for ARM from Microsoft.. in theory the person downloading is joining the Insiders beta test club, but Parallels doesn't make that obvious. Due to this sort of activity, Parallels has been banned from my corporate!

3. Microsoft licensing of WIndows on ARM is “grey” (my spin!) when running on Apple Silicon. Although I do it, I’m no longer a corporate slave so do what I want. But it’s a consideration that has been raised by those folks where legal and compliance rule the roost.

That is the problem in my corporate, we do a lot of MS based work, and so our legal team have said "no way".

Jon Honeyball's column in PCPro magazine a few months ago described running Windows 11 for ARM on his M1 or M2 Macbook Air, and he was amazed. Of course he is a director of his own company, so legal issues come straight back to him!

It has been reported (but not confirmed) that MS has an exclusive deal for Windows on ARM with Qualcomm CPUs... which explains, but is frustrating. Hence the Surface Pro X, and new Surface Pro 9.

Edited by jchamier (Wed 23-Nov-22 11:42:35)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

The hardware guys are looking to Qualcomm's future CPU releases as they integrate recent acquisions to see if they can create a similar feature set to M1.

Admittedly I’m not up to speed on the latest and greatest with Qualcomm’s plans for their ARM processor line, but Apple has had a huge head start and now are in the first third of their processor “decade” on their own desktop class silicon, so they continue to plough in huge resources.

Will be interesting to see how things pan out when Apple transition away from Qualcomm on their wireless chips and move to their own. Another play that has been under way for several years now.

Yes indeed, apologies I should have said virtualised in general rather than making it just a Parallels only thing. Which it’s not.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Admittedly I’m not up to speed on the latest and greatest with Qualcomm’s plans for their ARM processor line, but Apple has had a huge head start and now are in the first third of their processor “decade” on their own desktop class silicon, so they continue to plough in huge resources.

I'm following this on The Register and other sites. Apple "bought in" to get where they are, and a significant number of people left after 2 years formed their own company, and QCom bought that late last year, so maybe these people can recreate some of the good work they did for Apple in terms of performance improvements.

Will be interesting to see how things pan out when Apple transition away from Qualcomm on their wireless chips and move to their own. Another play that has been under way for several years now.

From last rumours that is taking a lot longer, Apple bought the Intel modem business for $1bn I believe, but Intel hadn't managed to get to 5G NR (had some very good 4G/LTE chips), and last rumour is that is still the big issue for that team. Qualcomm's shareholder reports showed they were expecting the loss of a large customer in 2023, but that has been pushed back.... the assumption is this is apple.

Apple "bought in" to get where they are, and a significant number of people left after 2 years formed their own company, and QCom bought that late last year, so maybe these people can recreate some of the good work they did for Apple in terms of performance improvements.

Read the same. Par for the course with these sorts of design engineers and talent in general. Rare for them to stay on on what effectively become a BAU role, once they’ve achieved the project ambition. Then it’s time to move on to the next challenge. How they keep sharp and employable.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Read the same. Par for the course with these sorts of design engineers and talent in general. Rare for them to stay on on what effectively become a BAU role, once they’ve achieved the project ambition. Then it’s time to move on to the next challenge. How they keep sharp and employable.

We see the same in my (super large) corporation. (but we don't do ARM chip design!)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

2. Running Windows for ARM requires Parallels. That in itself is OK performance-wise generally but doubtless an extra complication and cost. Then there is…

Looks like UTM can run ARM Windows 10/11 on the M1/M2.

https://mac.getutm.app

I've not tried it myself though.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Looks like UTM can run ARM Windows 10/11 on the M1/M2. https://mac.getutm.app
I've not tried it myself though.

I've seen reports it works. For home users the VMWare Fusion free edition is worth a look. (Unlike Parallels which is subscription).

Thanks I might give it a try out.

Also quite fancy running some vintage Solaris 9 for giggles. Reminds me of the SPARCstation 5 (or was it a 20..?!) that I first used back in the mid nineties on some Newbridge Networks switching multiplexer. God I feel old now 🤣

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Also quite fancy running some vintage Solaris 9 for giggles. Reminds me of the SPARCstation 5 (or was it a 20..?!) that I first used back in the mid nineties on some Newbridge Networks switching multiplexer. God I feel old now 🤣

SunOS?? 🤣 We had the pizza box machines with the huge paperwhite CRT displays at uni… most of the time running graphical desktops with 3 or 4 xterms with 80x25 sessions using VI or similar…. (Mid 1990s)

Yeah the pizza boxes. Must’ve been SunOS. No idea what version it was.

Early nineties at uni in computer science had NCD terminals running X-windows off some unix boxes I think it was running System V - networked by nothing less than 10Base-5 ‘thicknet’ with plug in transceivers. In e/engineering we had Linux on PCs and this new fangled star wired 10BaseT Ethernet. although I recall there was some thinnet Ethernet, TokenRing and FDDI about the place.

Now how to knock out a couple of student labs…

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Now how to knock out a couple of student labs…

We had the thicknet and the thinnet with the terminators. PCs were DOS, but the Sun lab was only for the CompSci students, most others used the VAX cluster, or the AlphaVAX if you were into database engineering…. Linux? What was that then…. 😂

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

2. Running Windows for ARM requires Parallels. That in itself is OK performance-wise generally but doubtless an extra complication and cost. Then there is…

Looks like UTM can run ARM Windows 10/11 on the M1/M2.

https://mac.getutm.app

I've not tried it myself though.

I’ll have a little play over the crimbo break and see what sort of figures GeekBench shoots out from W11 for ARM under Parallels and UTM on an M1 Max and native on a Volterra.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I’ll have a little play over the crimbo break and see what sort of figures GeekBench shoots out from W11 for ARM under Parallels and UTM on an M1 Max and native on a Volterra.

I'd be surprised if the M1 Max isn't significantly faster

VMware now has a product for this (Fusion 13) which may avoid the Parallels 'subscription' tax. There is even Fusion Player for free. (kinda destroys Virtualbox). Still only ARM instruction set operating systems.

Indeed.

I saw someone doing a test with a standard M1, running an ARM Linux VM, that was running the x86 copy of Geekbench (translated through Rosetta 2), that scored higher than native ARM W11 Geekbench on the Volterra. Though sadly I can't remember where I saw it.

I didn’t realise ARM Linux could use Rosetta, I thought it was limited to macOS. It was reported the M1 architecture includes hardware support for the x86/64 to ARM conversion, and everyone is waiting to see if Qualcomm’s processors will include any such optimisations with their acquisition of Nuvia.

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/qual...

Edited by jchamier (Fri 23-Dec-22 19:55:24)

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualiza...

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualiza...

Nice "gift" from Apple to the Linux community.

Speaking of 'gifts' and contributions to open source, have you read Terry Lambert's post on Quora about how they made Mac OS X pass Unix certification? It's an entertaining read...

https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to...

Merry Christmas to All 🎄🎄🎄

Very cool!

Yeah, right. He’s very polarising, a tad full of himself, but nonetheless entertaining to read. I liked this paragraph especially the bit about Linux…

“If I were asked to do the same thing for Linux, it likely would take five years, and two dozen people.

Linux is pretty balkanize, has a lot of kingdom building, and you have to pee on everything to make it smell like Linux.

I could do the same in FreeBSD in about a year and a half, with a dozen co-conspirators to run the changes through.”

🤣🤣

It is a shame the X Serve was discontinued but the cloud is the future I’m told.

🤣

It was only added in the latest version of macOS.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

It was only added in the latest version of macOS.

It will be interesting to see if the likes of Ubuntu (and hence Docker and similar developer tools) for macOS make use of it.