Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be releasing new hardware to encourage more developers to start using and supporting the Arm version of Windows. Dubbed "Project Volterra," all we knew about it at the time was that it would use an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and NVMe-based storage, that it would support at least two monitors, and that it would have a decent number of ports.
Today, Microsoft is putting Volterra out into the world, complete with a snappy new name: the Windows Dev Kit 2023. The Dev Kit 2023 will use a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3—essentially the same chip as the Microsoft SQ3 in the new 5G version of the Surface Pro 9—plus 512GB of storage and a whopping 32GB of RAM for the surprisingly low price of $599.
The Dev Kit 2023 is powered by a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, similar to the Microsoft SQ3 chip in the Surface Pro 9 with 5G. (credit: Microsoft)
We don't know exactly how fast the 8cx Gen 3 will be (Qualcomm says "up to 85 percent faster" CPU performance than the 8cx Gen 2, which would put it somewhere below but within spitting distance of modern Core i5 laptop CPU). But 512GB of storage and 32GB of memory should make the Dev Kit 2023 useful as a development and testing environment.
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