Technology

59622 readers

2787 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

587

Windows 11 24H2 goes from “unsupported” to “unbootable” on some older PCs (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

262 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 56 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

In modern x86 CPUs, POPCNT is implemented as part of the SSE4 instruction set. For Intel's chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD's processors, it's included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.

That effectively bars mid-2000s Intel Core 2 Duo systems and early Athlon 64-era PCs from booting Windows 11 at all, not that they officially supported it in the first place. This means the change should mainly affect retro-computing enthusiasts who spend their days making YouTube videos in the "we installed Windows 11 on a potato, let's see how it runs" genre rather than users of actual systems.

You can check if your CPU has SSE 4.2(Intel) or 4a(AMD) but it sounds like unless you're running some real old stuff you shouldn't have to worry.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

But isn't Microsoft just so evil for making it so their operating system doesn't function flawlessly on twenty year old hardware?

[–] FractalsInfinite 1 points 9 months ago

On the bright side writing software targeting windows 11 users allows you to use x64 version two, granting noticable speedups. Still annoying but Linux runs a lot faster then windows for old stuff anyway.