Launch of Microsoft's Surface.

Launch of Microsoft's Surface on October 12.

Microsoft's anticipated decline The date for the Surface launch is now set: October 12. The company's Ignite IT Pro conference begins on that day, and Meta holds its hardware-focused Meta Connect event the day following.

On September 21, Microsoft created a placeholder page for the gathering at microsoft.com/event (Thanks to The Walking Cat for the link.) On one page, the only text is "Watch Live to See What's Next," and the Windows background screen is depicted in watercolour. The event gets underway at 10:00 ET.

However, as far as we Microsoft watchers have learned thus far, nothing about the metaverse, augmented reality, or virtual reality will be introduced at Microsoft's event on October 12. The Surface Studio 3 all-in-one desktop, the Surface Pro 9 line of 2-in-1 convertibles, and a new Surface Laptop 5 are all expected to be unveiled by Microsoft. According to a rumour, Microsoft might introduce a Surface-branded gaming laptop at the occasion, which, in principle, doesn't seem all that unlikely given how strongly the company is promoting Xbox gaming services. (However, for the time being, few observers of the company seem to give this notion much weight.).

It does appear that Microsoft will bet more and more on Arm for parts of its hardware in the fall Surface launch. Surface Pro 9 might have both Intel and Arm-based devices, as Windows Central originally revealed. This would be a not-so-subtle positioning statement about how ready Microsoft thinks its Windows-on-Arm operating system is.

Speaking of Arm, Microsoft might also use its event on October 12 to make the "Project Volterra" hardware, which was first unveiled at its Build conference in May, available. Given that it has a Qualcomm neural-processing unit (NPU) built in, Project Volterra is an Arm-based desktop PC that Microsoft is marketing as a developer workstation that is especially suited to AI computing.

Microsoft representatives emphasised a "cross-development pattern for designing AI experiences that span the cloud and edge" during the Project Volterra announcement earlier this year. They have named this pattern "Hybrid Loop." The ONNX runtime, Azure Machine Learning, and a prototype AI toolchain that enables developers to target CPUs, GPUs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and NPUs will all surface this functionality.