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- cross-posted to:
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Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
They absolutely are unreasonably high. My barely overclocked 6700K is sufficient for virtually every new or slightly older game I throw at it, but somehow it’s not enough for the OS?
It’s not about the speed - the minimum requirements for Win 11 are a 1Ghz dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM- it’s because of the processor generation. Not sure if there’s been an official explanation, but the going consensus is that they aren’t going to officially support almost anything that is susceptible to Meltdown or Spectre.
That doesn’t mean Win 11 doesn’t work or couldn’t be installed on that hardware, they just don’t officially support it.
There are already precedents of software (the Riot games) and the OS itself refusing to work if the requirements are bypassed, so it’s a very risky move that nobody should choose for their main OS.
Do note that POPCNT instruction is required.
If you were to install windows 11 on some Intel core 2 Duo’s
-Linux mint user
SSE4.2 specifically, POPCNT is part of that. It was introduced in 2008, while the previous requirement for Win 10, Win 8, and in Win 7 after a 2018 update has been SSE2 from 2000. So Windows 11 bumps the oldest hardware requirement from 18 years up when introduces to 16/17 years.
FWIW, I believe from Linux Mint 20 onward it doesn’t have 32-bit builds so it isn’t compatible with processors that don’t support x86-64, and the first Intel processor to support that is from 2004.
It’s absolutely supported if you have SucureBoot and TPM 2.0 support. Sure, it’s not on the official support list but that’s probably because those features weren’t standard yet in that generation and it’s not tested and verified. It’ll still work fine though.
Also, performance is not everything. Support for certain instruction sets is usually the problem, when newer operating systems drop support for older chips. Of course that’s not it in this case, Skylake and Coffeelake are essentially identical and the latter does have official support.