Microsoft announces new Project Volterra device powered by Snapdragon

Microsoft announced the Project Volterra at the Microsoft Build 2022. The tech giant has also announced support for open hardware ecosystem. This new ecosystem will enable Windows to make use of more options in the processor arena, giving it the ability to support many special abilities.

Project Volterra

Microsoft announced Project Volterra, a new device powered by the Snapdragon compute platform. With Project Volterra, users will be able to explore many AI scenarios via the new Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit announced today by Qualcomm Technologies.

During the event, Microsoft also announced that the company will be providing support for Neural Processing Units (NPUs). These are chipsets that will be used in addition to CPU and GPU. The primary goal for the chip is to provide more efficient AI capabilities, without straining the GPU or CPU and at the same time reduce overall power usage throughout the entire setup.

Microsoft claims that it is building toward a vision for a world of intelligent hybrid computing, bringing together local compute on the CPU, GPU, and NPU and cloud compute with Azure. Microsoft claims that in the future, moving to compute workloads between client and cloud will be as dynamic and seamless as moving between Wi-Fi and cellular on your phone today.

AI will require heavy levels of processing power beyond the capabilities of traditional CPU and GPU alone. But new silicon-like neural processing units (NPUs) will add expanded capacity for key AI workloads.

Microsoft believes that NPUs will be built into most, if not all future computing devices. According to the company, they will make it easy for developers to leverage these new capabilities, by baking support for NPUs into the end-to-end Windows platform.

To ensure ease of use for Microsoft’s shared customers, the brand is also announcing a comprehensive end-to-end Arm-native toolchain for Arm native apps, including the following:

• Full Visual Studio 2022 & VSCode
• Visual C++
• Modern .NET 6 and Java
• Classic .NET Framework
• Windows Terminal
• WSL and WSA for running Linux and Android apps

Microsoft has announced that developers will see the first preview of many of these tools in the next few weeks, including VS 2022.

The post Microsoft announces new Project Volterra device powered by Snapdragon appeared first on BGR India.