Cloud Drive Mapper 3.22 now supports Windows on ARM-64.
There’s been an ever growing requirement in our customer base for ARM support. I’m pleased to say CDM now works beautifully on the new range of Copilot+ Snapdragon laptops, as well as all other ARM-64 Windows machines. Plus, as a Mac user, I run Windows 11 in a Parallels VM. Up until now I couldn’t use CDM in Parallels because the underlying chip architecture of my Mac is ARM-based. Now, with 3.22, I can!
But beyond meeting an important customer requirement and my own personal convenience, this release has some greater significance.
I’m a longtime ARM fan, in fact they were the first company I ever bought shares in (sadly I don’t still have them). My first contact with RISC-based computers was using early Acorns at school back in the early 90s – they used the predecessors to the modern ARM chips we see today.
I really appreciate simplicity and efficiency in computing, and RISC is the ultimate manifestation of those principles. We live increasingly in an age where the constraints of computing are more a constraint of energy generation – a point recently echoed by Satya Nadella. And while I appreciate some important workloads are impossible without huge amounts of compute, this trend of consuming ever enormous amounts of resources for speculative uses feels wasteful to my sensibilities.
Efficiency is at the heart of ARM architecture, and it gives ARM devices unique capabilities. It’s what has allowed smartphones to become more powerful than even the world’s largest supercomputers from a couple of human generations ago. Smartphones have changed the world a lot more than they often get credit. Around 5 billion in the people around the world use smartphones – a substantially greater number than the total number of desktop users. Today ARM is ubiquitous across mobile devices, all Apple Mac devices, and it’s increasing its share of Windows PCs month-on-month too.
Powerful yet low-cost laptops with significant battery life (all the hallmarks of an ARM machine) make desktop computing far more accessible – just in the same way that ARM processors revolutionized mobile phones.
The ARM revolution happening in the Windows ecosystem has the potential to change lives – millions of lives.
CDM has been shaped by similar principles. When we first decided we wanted to create a new generation of CDM technology that moved us beyond WebDAV, we had a number of pathways available to us. We could have created something that resembled WebDAV but in a modern form, or something closer to the OneDrive sync client but based around drives. In the end, we went for a route that we believe to be the most efficient and scalable model possible. It was however also the hardest to build. This is one of the reasons it took us over 5 years to build, instead of perhaps 1 or 2 had we chosen one of the other paths. But we’re proud of the choices we made, and the technology we’ve created.
An ARM-based laptop running CDM has unbeatable efficiency when it comes to power consumption, CPU, RAM, local storage and bandwidth utilisation. When idle CDM is featherweight, but the key to great efficiency isn’t just its lightness, it’s also about its scalability and performance. Cloud Drive Mapper’s profoundly efficient use of cloud resources allows it to seamlessly access storage systems orders of magnitude greater (in both GB and number of objects) than the OneDrive sync client allows – all while using less resource. It maintains a tiny footprint on the device, which keeps the machine sharp, responsive and as productive as possible for the user and their workflows.
Now CDM sits unrivalled as an integration medium for cloud storage. All of the essential foundations are already in place, and while we’re at the end of one journey – from an idea to a tangible product in use by over a million people. We’re now at the beginning of a new journey to take CDM to completely new heights. Without efficiency at CDM’s core, we would be greatly limited in its future growth. As it is, the future is very bright. And I am particularly excited for the journey ahead of CDM and ARM, and the possibilities they can bring together to users all over the world.
Author: Leon Mallett, IAM Cloud COO
