Project Volterra is a Windows dev kit with an Arm CPU and NPU. It will include native Arm64 Visual Studio and .NET support to provide the same fast, familiar, and highly productive experience developers are used to. The Visual Studio team will have more announcements in the next few weeks related specifically to Visual Studio Arm64 support. I loved the sizzle video the marketing team created:
If you are like me you a probably hearing the term NPU for the first time. Here is a quick definition I found:
NPU (neural processing unit) is a specialized processor for network application packets, using a "data-driven parallel computing" architecture, especially good at processing massive multimedia data such as video and images.
What are the scenarios that an NPU might enable? Well do you remember the eye gaze correction and voice clarity technology that was limited to Qualcomm chips? Well that nifty piece of tech was enabled because of the NPU found in devices like the Surface Pro X and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. It is becoming evident that the NPUs will feature in many computing devices going forward offloading work normally pushed onto the CPU or GPU.
Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee but all the information here is in the public record, sourced from the Windows blog or discussed on sites like Windows Central. I generally get to know things when you do … or after.
Comments are closed.