At the heart of developer productivity lies improving performance for developer workloads on Windows. Last year at Build, we announced Dev Drive a new storage volume tailor-made for developers and supercharged for performance and security. Since then, we have continued to invest further in Windows performance improvements for developer workloads.
With the release of Windows 11 24H2, workflows will get even faster when developing on a Dev Drive. Windows copy engine now has Filesystem Block Cloning, resulting in nearly instantaneous copy actions and drastically improving performance, especially in developer scenarios that copy large files.
Pavan Davuluri on the Windows blog
Sounds like a near and meaningful improvement.
I will say there are other very impressive features announced in that blogpost.
For example:
We are introducing Windows Semantic Index… Basically integrating your application search into the operating system. However unlike the previous search api, this is “semantic search” meaning it focuses on document understanding (like Bert or GPT) instead of basic keyword based indexing.
Phi Silica API along with OCR, Studio Effects, Live Captions, Recall User Activity APIs… They are building a bunch of native APIs based on machine learning models. So developers instead of needing to download a model from hugging face, and figuring out how to run it locally, will just be able to call an API to do OCR or speech recognition (they already had some of these before)
Recall that helps users instantly find almost anything3 they’ve seen on their PC… This is the controversial screen recording thingie (I believe). It basically uses a “vision transformer” to convert your screen into a textual description (“the user is working on a github project on vscode”). At least that is how I would implement it. Again extremely divisive and controversial.
Others like Windows Studio Effects, and Live captions… Welcome to the 21th century!. The camera stack seems to receive an update for OS based effect. So instead of Zoom / Meet / Skype / all others doing real time processing, it will be done with system APIs.
PyTorch is now natively supported on Windows with DirectML… Previously you needed WSL to run pytorch at good speeds. They now have implemented what I assume a ATEN wrapper for Windows APIs. Good for them.
Overall technically very exciting.
For a product point of view, though, we need a lot to discuss…