Windows ARM64 Build

[Blzut3]

Found a collection of the drivers files (Qualcomm seems to have pulled the downloads for the GPU drivers from their site temporarily since I swear they were up there a few weeks ago): https://github.com/WOA-Project/Qualcomm ... ree/master Poking at the cab files (the ones in question would be qcdx*) it looks like native Vulkan and OpenCL are indeed exclusive to the Snapdragon X. Granted only time will tell if that remains to be the case. Given it feels like Qualcomm wants to sweep the 8cx/7cx models under the rug, I'd be kind of surprised if they do back port it.

[Rachael]

No, I'd be really surprised if they backported the drivers, really. The GPU itself is pretty well capable of running light-weight Vulkan stuff if the drivers are provided but they aren't, in this case.

In any event, this is the first time I've seen first-party GPU drivers on Windows ARM64. They're buggy, but they still count, and they're still better than the layer drivers.

[dpJudas]

It had a 24H2 release. Came with some copilot stuff that I immediately uninstalled, so can't comment much on that part.

I uploaded the driver to vulkan.gpuinfo.org. The upload is branded as x64 due to the Vulkan SDK only came in a 64 bit build. From what I could tell on the startup screen its the same info returned for ARM64. It also came preinstalled with Vulkan to D3D12 driver that Microsoft created.

Here's a screenshot of vkdoom booting with an arm build:

[BFeely]

I don't think any of those run UEFI (Pi and Macs don't as I stated), so Windows won't work out of the box on them not because Microsoft is blocking it but because embedded vendors refuse to implement the right firmware for it. This goes for Linux too since most of the complaints I see about non-Raspberry Pi boards is that support for the specialized images is very poor. I'm not sure where the surprise is that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia haven't shown any interest in making drivers for that. Which is why I think if the new Snapdragons support PCIe over USB4 that could be a big deal for potential driver support.

Ignoring the boot issue with the Macs, I don't believe I've seen any change here but this is pretty much the last I heard about the viability of using third party GPUs with the Mac Pro: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marca ... 1013808982 So not a viable platform for developing ARM GPU drivers at least at this time.

Again the one exception I'm aware of is the Ampere stuff (although that Mastodon thread notes the Altra has issues with its PCIe implementation too), but I don't expect that to really be on the radar until Server 2025.

People have made Windows 11 run on Pi 4 with an emulated UEFI. This doesn't work for 24H2 however as that requires ARMv8.2 and thus requires a Pi 5.