Windows on Arm Ampere Altra home builds is a thing so adding it to Arm developer build guide for Ampere Altra. Share your insights and I’ll roll it up into the build guide.
Windows 11 24H2, Windows Server 2025 Insider Preview install and work fine. Main issue is lack of drivers but people are working on that. Not yet officially supported though Azure and their customers run huge Windows workloads in production on Azure Arm Ampere Altra instances all the live long day.
- GitHub - AmpereComputing/Windows-11-On-Ampere: This repo contains scripts and documents to create Windows 11 ISO and install Windows 11 on Ampere CPU based workstation. … this still current or is this easier now?
- ASPEED Windows Display Driver 1.15.2 and later for Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025 Insider preview. Also supports ASRock TOMMY display card for 2nd display in addition to the display built into all Ampere Altra boards including ASRock Rack, ADLINK, Gigabyte, Supermicro, HPE, et al.
- Intel i210 Windows on Arm driver GitHub - filipnavara/igb: Intel GbE Family Community Driver for Windows 11, build from source and self-sign. Or install Release preview2 · filipnavara/igb · GitHub after enabling test signing (
bcdedit /set testsigning offon command line). It’s a bit easier than building from source (which is always an option though). Intel i210 drivers are stable enough that the ASRock Rack Ampere Win11 machine has been running with them for weeks, 3 week uptime at the moment, only restarted because of HW upgrades. h/t/ Filip Navara - NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX network cards drivers are included because Windows on Arm on Azure on Ampere Altra.
- Realtek NICs under different brands but same gen chips, so there’s some Toshiba/Lenovo/Xiaomi. The newer Realtek chips are supported although the Realtek drivers are not distributed in-box. GitHub - coolstar/if_re-win: Open Source Realtek Ethernet Windows driver h/t Filip Navara x.com
- Marvell 88W8897 is an AzureWave AW-CB178NF connected to the second m.2 key m via an adapter. Tracked this one down on the Microsoft page for Windows on ARM NXP, then got the drivers mentioned from the NXP Windows BSP. You seem to have to right click and install via the .inf, but it works fine afterwards. h/t @ara
- WoA includes are many USB drivers including Samsung phones and such, aside from the generic ones, USB4 peer-to-peer.
- GPU driver is not released but if you follow the news …
One approach I’ve noticed many doing successfully is digging into the list of Windows on Arm device drivers, finding which chips are supported because they’re used in Surface, laptops, et al. and then finding PCIe cards with those chips on Newegg, Amazon, et al.
Cinebench result for Windows 11 24H2 on Ampere Altra using only 64 of the cores. Looking for Cinebench update that unlocks its full potential and uses all 128 3.0GHz cores for a much higher result.
h/t @geerlingguy for so many things
. Everything I've learned building the fastest Arm desktop | Jeff Geerling
. Ampere Altra Max - Windows, GPUs, and Gaming | Jeff Geerling
And thanks to our ADLINK friends too
