Windows Arm Hits Significant Milestone Ahead of RTX Spark Launch
Microsoft is celebrating a significant milestone for Windows Arm as it prepares to launch the new RTX Spark platform this fall. The company credits Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Series of chips and Microsoft's own Prism emulation layer for enabling the growth of the platform, which has been plagued by app compatibility issues in the past.
The Works on Windows on Arm site now lists over 7,000 verified apps and games built directly from Microsoft's compatibility data. This is a significant increase from two years ago when the first Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs launched, with most of the conversation at that time centered around app support.
Microsoft also reports that more than 85% of the Xbox Game Pass catalog is now compatible with Arm-based Windows 11 PCs. The company's own App Assure app compatibility program has been instrumental in helping developers migrate existing apps or provide guidance on developing new apps for its Arm native operating system.
The RTX Spark platform, which pairs a 20-core Arm CPU with a full Blackwell RTX GPU and CUDA support, is aimed squarely at creators and developers who need more GPU horsepower. Microsoft's task scheduler has reportedly been rewritten to take advantage of the chip design, and Prism itself has been retuned for RTX Spark's particular mix of CPU and GPU cores.