Tinkerer brings Windows 11 to craft PCs with ARM CPUs from Rockchip

A developer specializing in single-board computers (SBC) has apparently finally managed to get Windows 11 to run on such a hobbyist computer with an ARM CPU from Rockchip.

As Mario Balanica announced on Twitter, he managed to make the ARM version of Windows 11 usable on a Radxa Rock 5B single-board computer. The whole thing is part of his WoR project, which is actually dedicated to using Windows 10 and 11 in their full versions on Raspberry Pi series handicraft computers.

Most recently, however, Balanica was mainly concerned with transferring his experience from working with RPi variants to other platforms, so he is now showing for the first time how Windows 11 Professional can be used on a board with a Rockchip RK3588 SoC. According to him, Windows 11 already works impressively well on the Chinese octa-core chip.

Windows 11 is already almost fully usable

Not only can the desktop be used to its full extent on the system, but most onboard devices including PCI Express support already work, as does virtualization, so that the Android subsystem for Windows can already be used. Balanica’s work gives inventors another option to use the ARM version of Windows 11 on unusual platforms.

Balanica also presented the first benchmark results, which are of course low compared to PCs otherwise used with Windows 11 but are quite impressive given the type of platform used here.

The Rockchip RK3588, which is used on the Radxa Rock 5B, offers four ARM Cortex-A55 and four Cortex-A76 cores that reach a maximum of 2.4 gigahertz, but in this case only with a maximum of 1 .2 GHz work. How exactly Balanica got Windows 11 running on Radxa’s SBC and whether the method can also be used relatively easily by third parties, he wants to publish in the near future via his website and the associated GitHub repository.