CDM & ARM: efficient harmony

Published 21 November 2025 · by Leon Mallett

Cloud Drive Mapper 3.22 now supports Windows on ARM-64. The ARM revolution happening in the Windows ecosystem has the potential to change lives , millions of lives.

ARM support, at last

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.

Why this matters more than it might look

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.

Efficiency, scale and the constraints of computing

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 some important workloads are impossible without huge amounts of compute, this trend of consuming ever-more energy is going in the wrong direction.

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. Around 5 billion people around the world use smartphones, a substantially greater proportion of humanity than has access to traditional PCs.

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 revolutionised mobile phones.

CDM shaped by similar principles

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. 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 the most scalable.

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 scalability and performance. CDM's profoundly efficient use of cloud resources allows it to seamlessly access storage systems orders of magnitude larger than what's practically possible with sync-based clients.

End of one journey, beginning of another

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. ARM, efficiency and CDM are in efficient harmony.

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