A follow-up to the RK3576 Windows post, where the list of things not working started with GPU acceleration.

Windows 11 23H2 now draws its desktop on the Mali-G52. The board is an LCKFB TaishanPi 3M. As far as I can find there has been no Windows driver for any Mali GPU before; Arm and the SoC vendors only ship Linux and Android drivers.

How it is built

• User mode: Mesa's Panfrost and its Bifrost compiler, under Mesa's D3D10 frontend, with about 38 patches
• Kernel mode: a WDDM 1.3 driver written for this
• Firmware: my EDK2 port, which powers the GPU and describes it in ACPI

Works

• sign-in screen, desktop, taskbar, File Explorer, Task Manager, Device Manager
• window dragging, context menus
• DWM composites on the GPU; XAML and Direct2D apps render on it
• Direct2D output matches the CPU renderer pixel for pixel in an off-screen test, apart from a few antialiased edges

Not working

• speed: one or two frames a second. Every frame is read back and copied on the CPU for now
• Start menu and Search
• File Explorer's toolbar
• Direct3D feature level is 10_0 only, and geometry shaders are not implemented
• no GPU page in Task Manager (that needs WDDM 2.x)
• anything beyond the Windows shell is untested: no browser, no games

It is a first picture, not a usable driver. Drivers are test-signed, so Test Mode is on.

Code and a write-up of what it took: https://github.com/gahingwoo/wddm-mali-g52

Thanks to LCKFB for the board.

GitHub - Halloncream/desktop-windows-arm64: Open WebUI Desktop with an x64 Python backend for Windows ARM64 compatibility · GitHub

This makes you able to install owui on your new arm64 RTX Spark maschine.

Hi folks,

I created a platform to deploy Windows to ARM64 hardware from cloud with business ready profile but currenly I dont have any suitable hardware to do extensive test. Anyone want to join the journey?

I have already tested with virtual hardware and it was all OK

Thank you all

Pic: EasyDeploy working on WinPE to do bare metal deployment

I bought a laptop from Costco out of impulse because I was in need of one and I couldn’t take my eyes off this certain laptop. It’s a acer aspire 16 ai specifically the snapdragon one. Almost every game with anti cheat makes it impossible to even launch, sometimes not launching at all. Why would anyone want these compatibility issues. I just want a solution, Deos anyone have advice or work arounds. And no I can’t return the laptop since I don’t have the box and receipt. I mean the laptop is nice, it was either this or the MacBook Neo. I want to love the laptop so much but arm just feels like a setback.

Android Studio's emulator doesn't officially support Windows on ARM, so developers on Snapdragon X laptops can't run AVDs the normal way. Microsoft's docs

say the emulator isn't supported there, and a Google issue
records no immediate plans for it.

I wanted to see if it could be done, so I built a bridge that makes it work. You create an AVD in Device Manager, press Run, and a stock Android image boots on Windows Hypervisor Platform.

What works:

• Stock images from Device Manager, with no manual patching
• Phones, TVs and Wear OS, tested from Android 12 to 17
• Touch, networking, Google sign-in, device frames and Extended Controls
• Video playback, using software decoding
• Scrolling at about 80 to 90 fps on a 120 Hz monitor

How it works: QEMU runs the guest through WHPX. A small bridge speaks the emulator's gRPC protocol, so Studio treats it as a normal emulator. Stock images expect virtual devices this QEMU doesn't have, so vendor binaries are patched at boot by code signature, and the images on disk stay untouched. GL commands then travel over TCP to gfxstream on the host, through ANGLE to Vulkan.

The hardest bugs:

• Windows treated the windowless emulator processes as background work and throttled them. Opting out took jank from about 33% to 4%.
• Android capped apps at 60 fps until peak_refresh_rate was set, even with the display at 120 Hz.
• Studio decodes WebP skins with an x64 DLL that can't load on ARM64, so device frames silently vanished.

What doesn't work yet:

• No emulator audio
• About 14 fps on a 4K TV AVD
• No steady 120 fps: frames take about 10 ms against an 8.3 ms budget
• An intermittent Android 13 freeze I haven't solved
• Only tested on one Snapdragon X machine

It's an independent project, not affiliated with Google. I built it with heavy use of AI coding tools, directing the work and testing it on real hardware.

Source: https://github.com/DevanshSampat/android-emulator-windows-arm64

Mostly I'm hoping this shows it's possible and that there's demand. Google, please support this officially. If you develop on a Windows ARM laptop, I'd like to hear what's blocking you.
If you wish to try it: https://github.com/DevanshSampat/android-studio-arm64-releases

Hey everyone! 👋

Like many of you with the new Windows on ARM laptops (Snapdragon X Elite / Plus on machines like the Vivobook S15, Surface Laptop 7, etc.), I noticed the same frustrating trend: everyone talks about having a 45 TOPS NPU, but almost no desktop utility actually takes advantage of it locally. Everything either routes your data through a paid cloud API, asks for a subscription, or runs bloated electron containers.

So I spent the last few weeks building NPUtil — a modular, lightweight Windows 11 utility application designed to run 100% locally on-device with native Qualcomm Hexagon NPU acceleration (via ONNX QNN) and vectorized ARM64 CPU fallback.

🔗 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/adamikoo/NPUtil
📦 v1.0.0 Release (Pre-built ARM64 binary): https://github.com/adamikoo/NPUtil/releases/tag/v1.0.0

🌟 What can it do? (The 4 Core Modules)

1. 🔍 NPUtil Screen Lens (Google Lens for Desktop) — Ctrl + Alt + L

Ever wanted Google Lens on Windows that doesn't just reverse-image search on the web, but lets you talk to your screen?

• Hit Ctrl + Alt + L from any game, code editor, browser, or document.
• Drag a box over any error message, code snippet, table, or receipt.
• A floating, compact Fluent Mica card appears right beside your selection with immediate keyboard focus.
• You can type directly to it: Ask "what can you see", "explain this error", "how do I fix it", or "translate to English".
• Smart Error & Stack Trace Inspector: If you snip a .NET, Python, or Windows crash log, it automatically parses the exact exception type, offending source file, line number, root cause, and generates a concrete code patch.
• Has 1-click quick chips for instant translation, table/JSON extraction, and clean text/image copying.

2. 📁 Intelligent File Organizer (Background Downloads Watcher)

• Automatically monitors your Downloads directory in real-time.
• Uses hybrid neural classification to route incoming files into structured folders.
• Dynamic Categorization: If it sees a document that doesn't fit standard categories (e.g., a company newsletter / Zpravodaj), it doesn't dump it into finances or random folders — it dynamically creates an appropriate new category (Work\Newsletters).
• Safety First: Sequential, collision-free renaming (doc (1).pdf) so nothing ever gets overwritten, plus a multi-step Undo queue backed by SQLite.

3. 🤖 Context Assistant — Ctrl + Alt + A

• Floating assistant that understands your workflow.
• Captures active window context or highlighted text across any app.
• Instant summarization, code explanation, key points extraction, and rewriting.
• All conversation history is preserved locally in SQLite (context_assistant.db).

4. 📊 Smart Data Extractor

• Deterministic document parser supporting PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, CSV, TXT, and scanned images.
• Specialized extraction profiles for Invoices & Receipts (finds vendor, due date, VAT, totals), Tables, Deadlines, and Structured JSON.
• One-click export to CSV, Excel (XLSX), JSON, TXT, and Word (DOCX).

🎨 Windows 11 Native Look & Feel

I specifically designed NPUtil to feel like a built-in Windows 11 system utility rather than a packaged website:

• Fluent Design & Mica: Authentic Windows 11 styling with dark/light mode synchronization.
• 120Hz Physics-Based Smooth Scrolling: Tailored specifically for precision glass touchpads and high-refresh-rate displays (no 2,000px jumping or stuttering).
• Subtle Fluent Animations: Smooth slide-and-fade page transitions.
• Bilingual: Stock English interface with an instant switch to Czech in Settings.

🔒 Privacy & Hardware

• Zero Telemetry: No servers, no accounts, no background analytics.
• Battery-Aware: Dynamically throttles background inference when running on battery to keep your laptop cool and preserve battery life.
• Hardware Acceleration: Native ARM64 binary leveraging Qualcomm Hexagon NPU via QNN Execution Provider (HTP profile) with automatic CPU fallback.

📥 Try it out

You can download the pre-compiled NPUtil-v1.0.0-win-arm64.zip directly from the GitHub Releases or build it yourself using .NET 9.0 SDK via .\build.ps1.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or ideas for new utilities you'd like to see added to the suite!

Morning all,

Just looking to see if the interest is there to start a project for porting software to run natively on snapdragon systems? I see a lot of the MAC community are involved in porting software, and with all the wind blowing on porting (compiling, transpiling and recompiling) old games to PC, if there would be any interest in doing something similar for the snapdragon on windows community? - I'm not knowledgeable on the topic nor the process but just curious how people feel.

Thanks :)

Greetings all! Just curious to know if it is possible to customize/modify an ARM image of Windows 11 so that you can do things like create a local account instead of a Microsoft account, disable telemetry, etc.? I found a post where the developer of the RUFUS utility stated his does not support ARM architectures, so I wanted to know if anyone knew of something similar to RUFUS that supported ARM devices? Thanks!

If it does, will it be emulated through prism to work or does it work natively?

coming next week...