Volterra First Look | Windows Dev Kit 2023 Tests

Windows def kit 2023 they shorten the word developer to Dev that's catchy Microsoft I myself prefer the cooler name Volterra so I've been playing around with this for about a week now and this video is kind of a summary of my initial Impressions with this system I'll skip all the grass growing installation bits here and cut right to the chase but if you did want to see the whole unboxing and setup in real time I'll link to the live stream we did the other day in the description so many of you will be interested in how this machine will handle developer oriented tasks compared to the M1 Mac Mini since both of these machines are based around an arm SOC or system on chip architecture and while silver beats black in the synthetic benchmark scores in my series on Volterra I'll be testing individual developer workflows and doing compilation tests and we'll go ahead to head against the mini as well as some other machines and I'm especially curious to see if running Windows on arm in parallels on a Mac can compete with a dedicated arm Windows box like Volterra so make sure you subscribe and stay tuned for the those videos coming up so about the Box itself you have to charge it using the AC to DC adapter that comes with it it's a 90 watt brick there is no power delivery option available for charging via USBC unfortunately but using those two USBC ports you can run up to three monitors simultaneously that includes that mini display port which is the primary monitor output if you choose not to use the DisplayPort and only use USBC for your monitor outputs there is a really long delay and I found this in the documentation there's up to 25 seconds that you have to wait before any image is shown on the monitor this delay doesn't happen when you're using DisplayPort but still compared to the Mac Mini the startup time is a little bit slower although not by a lot once the machine is going and is idling with nothing running it's using about five to six watts of power this is compared to Mac minis three to four watts of power while just sitting there power usage does go up considerably if you start running any software for example if you start up WSL which is the windows subsystem for Lin Linux pretty common thing you'll be doing with this box as I'll get into in a moment power usage jumps up to about 30 Watts now just after setup if you take a look at what's running on the machine the services that are running you'll notice that actually Microsoft did a pretty good job translating or porting over most of the services to arm with just a couple still not ported over that run via Microsoft's own arm translation layer these are not Mission critical services so it's okay because if they were Mission critical I'd be a little worried as a Microsoft's translation layer is not the fastest thing around when the CPUs do run full blast on a multi-core python algorithm that made the power usage jump up to 30 watts and the body temperature rose up to 46 degrees from a nice cool 31 degrees while standing still and idling there's also a fan in this box it's pretty silent I could not hear it at all and when I did run the CPUs at full blast it was just a gentle breeze very tolerable noise floor on that now speaking of Hardware I did run winsat disc on this to get the speed of the hard drive that's installed 2700 megabytes per second read speed with about 1691 write speed so about a middle of the line SSD in there none of the ports on the machine are labeled by the way so if you wanted to check what uh network speed is on that ethernet port you really have to dig through the documentation but Jeff kirling ran some Network tests using iperf and he got one gigabit speeds on that port you do get Windows 11 Pro with a box there's no special developer features that are enabled and it's pretty much a consumer experience right out of the box you have to install and turn on any features that are Developer related like WSL for example and I'm glad they included Windows 11 Pro here because then I can just enable remote desktop and use this box as a headless server somewhere in the closet in which case any noise that you might have heard or coil wine that Jeff reported on which I could not reproduce by the way you won't even hear that now let's talk about what's really good about this box from a developer standpoint first of all if you're a net developer this box is really good it's you're gonna be in heaven Visual Studio runs perfectly it's just chef's kiss of course not all workflows are yet supported on this and visual studio 2022 17.4 preview 6 is still in preview it's not yet fully out but it will be very soon and if you're doing node via Visual Studio I'm sorry but if you're doing asp.net and those workflows dot net core things like that then you're golden I did test the iron version of Visual Studio on an Apple silicon Mac through parallels on Windows arm and that was already impressive enough now this being arm Hardware you can imagine it does a good job if you're not in the visual studio ecosystem you're probably using visual studio code and installing Visual Studio code is super easy when you're on the installation website there's a nice Matrix displaying what type of installer you want and for what architecture really easy but with Windows 11 you get winget which is a really simple way to install tools like Visual Studio code you just pop open Terminal run winget install code and it automatically figures out that you need the arm version of Visual Studio code installs it and boom you're ready to go without needing to visit any websites or anything like that I've also installed git this way and power toys is fully arm compatible as well for those of you that use that really nice set of tools for Windows and finally WSL I told you I'll get back to that WSL or Windows subsystem for Linux if you don't use it much yet with this box you will since there's a lot of software that is available for x64 Windows and arm Linux and even Apple silicon Max but there's a glaring gap of missing software for arm Windows some of the most prominent things that I use that are missing like Docker Chrome mini conda for python development installing these might even work fine but running them will be a mixed bag of either molasses slow as molasses or you're going to get errors I kind of had a feeling this wouldn't work but I did try installing Docker desktop on Windows this is probably not going to work but I'm gonna try it don't do it man Docker desktop is not going to work on there I'm gonna do it you gotta try [Music] I told you so some of the software you won't be able to use on Windows for arm at least not effectively but they will work beautifully in Linux for arm that runs inside of Windows for arm they just need to be the Linux versions of the software of Docker as a good example of that Docker works perfectly fine inside of WSL and luckily the performance inside of WSL is pretty close to Native windows I did run geekbench on both WSL and on Windows and WSL single core performance and geekbench is actually better than on Native Windows multi-core performance on Windows beats that of WSL but not by much bendicad on Twitter reported that Linux running in a VM got higher geekbench scores then geekbench on Windows natively which really shows what an incredible job the virtualization team at Microsoft is done and I'm gonna Venture a guess that WSL benefits tremendously from that thank you all right mobile Dev um let's talk about that for a second and I know I won't cover all the development topics right now but I'll I'll get to them maybe not all of them but I'll get to some of them mobile Dev is something I do so I was interested in seeing how this will work and unfortunately mobile Dev doesn't get enough love yet on this machine while you're able to run Windows subsystem for Android since it supports arm this will allow you to load and run Android apps from the Amazon store on Windows to test your apps the typical developer tool chain for Android development won't work as Android Studio doesn't really come in a Windows Forum version however jetbrains has just on October 28th they push the windows for arm 64 build you can try that out now for iOS development I'm going to use my Mac Mini for that yeah just because some software doesn't natively support Windows for arm it doesn't mean you can't run it at all windows for arm has that translation layer built in that I was talking about earlier it translates your x86 and x64 software to run on arm in real time this is similar to how Rosetta 2 translates x64 software on a Mac but just much much slower even running an x64 version of chrome chrome is not available in Windows for arm by the way at all yeah I know there's chromium that you could use and actually Edge is based on chromium and Edge works pretty nicely but anyway getting back to the topic here the x64 version of Chrome is extremely slow it's visibly slow compared to the native edge browser and speedometer tests confirm this even if you were able to install Android Studio the full IDE or really any tool or any developer IDE that's going to be x64 only it's possible but in reality it's out of the question you might be into machine learning and machine learning workflows are supported by the onboard npu or the neural Processing Unit but you might need to tweak your pipelines to use the Qualcomm neural processing SDK or the Onyx runtime so Volterra is a great machine for those developers that use the Microsoft stack and are also comfortable with Linux you're going to be using Linux or WSL more precisely for a lot of your tasks on this box so get used to it I have to disappoint some people these are the Die Hard Linux fans that thought oh we're just going to install Linux on bare metal here running Linux directly on metal on this machine without special modifications and new drivers to allow it to run in this Qualcomm 8 processor is currently not doable there's no support for right now so you're going to be forced to use WSL for a lot of your tasks another Alex Alex Ellis published his attempts at installing Linux on this box I'll link to his post down below it's pretty interesting but at the same time it's also disappointing he goes through all the different things he's tried to get Linux working on the on bare metal on his box he even tried to use a custom build Linux kernel via WSL and that did not work at least not yet so who is this box for well it's for a subset of developers who are trying to Port their applications their existing applications over to Windows for arm it's for people that are going to get a really nice machine with 32 gigs of RAM if you want to do asp.net development you can do python development on it you can do JavaScript development on it front and back end but it's going to be a strictly development machine I don't think this machine is for consumers there's just simply not enough software available for you to easily run on this machine through windows it's a good development machine but my initial impressions are that those that have a limited budget and can spend maybe a hundred dollars more for Mac Mini and get parallels with the windows for arm environment with visual studio and get all the apps that the Mac ecosystem has to offer then that's a better deal right now for consumers and those developers where you don't have Mission critical testing that you need to do for your windows for arm apps but I also think that Microsoft is not really targeting consumers here they called it the windows dev kit 2023. it's very specific it's not a Surface Mini or a surface desktop for a reason I'm really glad that they're moving into this direction and I hope that they keep offering more and more Hardware to support developers and consumers with Windows for arm it's gonna be great it's just going to take a little bit of time so thanks for watching that's it for me today I'll be back [Music] foreign

Channel: Alex Ziskind

Views: 47,466

Keywords: build 2022, microsoft build, microsoft build 2022, microsoft volterra, ms build, project volterra, project volterra microsoft, visual studio, visual studio 2022, volterra, m1, m1 max, dotnet on mac, visual studio arm, visual studio arm64, windows dev kit 2023, windows arm

Id: SRvynGd6YzI

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022