Microsoft announced ‘Project Volterra,’ a device powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC, at the three-day (May 24-26) annual Build 2022 conference. Project Volterra will enable developers to explore “AI scenarios” with the help of Qualcomm’s new Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit.
Build 2022 is Microsoft’s yearly developer conference, which is attended by IT professionals, engineers and students.
Project Volterra is a stackable mini-PC, which looks a lot like the black Mac mini. However, it is a developer kit which makes it more similar to the Apple Developer Transition Kit (DTK) that featured a Mac mini shell and the A12Z Bionic from an iPad Pro.
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Microsoft’s new developer kit succeeds the Snapdragon Dev Kit of last year, which relied on the first-generation Snapdragon 7c. Although Microsoft did not name the Snapdragon commuting platform on which Project Volterra is based, WinFuture believes it could be the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 with four ARM Cortex-X1 cores running at 2.99 GHz and another four Cortex-A78 cores running at 2.4 GHz.
Fully-loaded
Project Volterra is also a stackable mini-PC, which means developers can combine two or more Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 chipsets together.
Arriving later this year, Project Volterra will be packaged with dual USB Type-C ports, three Type-A ports, a Mini DisplayPort and Ethernet. Unlike Apple’s DTK or M1-based Mac mini, Project Volterra is expected to be shipped with an M.2 2280 slot for SSDs, reports said.
Microsoft has also announced that it would provide support in Windows for neural processing units (NPUs). NPUs are chips used in addition to the CPU and GPU. These chips are tailored for AI- and machine learning-specific workloads without hampering the GPU or CPU. They also help in reducing the overall power usage throughout the entire setup.
Dedicated AI chips are now common in smartphones. With apps like AI-powered image upscalers gaining popularity, laptop manufacturers are also adding such chips to their devices. Apple has the Neural Engine in M1 Macs, while Microsoft’s Surface Pro X has the SQ1, also co-developed with Qualcomm.
According to Microsoft, Project Volterra will feature a “best-in-class” AI computing capacity and efficiency. The chip will be ARM-based, enabling developers to build and test native-ARM apps alongside tools such as Visual Studio, VSCode, Microsoft Office and Teams. Project Volterra heralds Microsoft’s “end-to-end” developer toolchain for Arm-native apps, Tech Crunch reported.
This is not the first time that Microsoft and Qualcomm are partnering in the AI developer hardware arena. In 2018, the two companies jointly launched the Vision Intelligence Platform, with fully integrated support for computer vision algorithms running through Microsoft’s Azure ML and Azure IoT Edge services.
