News Older systems now won't be able to update to newer versions of Windows due to reliance on an arcane CPU instruction

[Admin]

A new POPCNT requirement was discovered for Windows 11 24H2, which will need to be met by every system that wants to upgrade to the 24H2 update.

Older systems now won't be able to update to newer versions of Windows due to reliance on an arcane CPU instruction : Read more

 

[evdjj3j]

I'm confused why this article exists, Windows 11 never supported any CPU older that Intel 8xxx or Ryzen 2xxx.

 

[Amdlova]

That is the famous Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V article

 

[BTM18]

Because it is click-bait BS story. No one is trying to run 11 on twenty YO pc's. Give me a break.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

POPCNT is part of the SSE 4.2 instruction set, which came about in the early 2000s. Every Intel CPU since the first Core series, codenamed Nehalem

OK, so this is a nothingburger. Why is this on Tom's Hardware, other than maybe to help https://twitter.com/NTDEV_ with the latest Tiny11 build? /s

 

[bit_user]

Hey Microsoft, I found this for you!

num_1bits = (c * 01001001001ULL & 042104210421ULL) % 017;

: D

Credit: http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hacks.html#item167

Caveats: requires 64-bit and only works for counting the bits in a single byte.

 

[mitch074]

Non-event. It's merely an indication that Microsoft flipped a bit in the build file - compilers will target a set of instructions by default, this merely tells the VSCPP compiler that it can use 15 years old instructions instead of 20 years old ones (as it was before as of Windows 8.1). I'm pretty sure that Windows 11 was originally compiled with the same instructions as for Windows 10, and then after a few builds where guinea pigs users didn't have problems, they went up a notch, and now they're trying again.
By Windows 11's EOL in 2027, we might just reach something close to the actual minimum requirements for Win 11 (Haswell for Intel, Zen 1 for AMD).

 

[stonecarver]

due to reliance on an arcane CPU instruction often used for AI ---neural networks---​

I just wanted to see and understand this subject a little more on how a neural network works and why Microsoft is making it a requirement.

What is a Neural Network? - Artificial Neural Network Explained - AWS

Find out what a neural network is, how and why businesses use neural networks,, and how to use neural networks on AWS.

aws.amazon.com

Just a few things mentioned from that page.

What are neural networks used for?​

Neural networks have several use cases across many industries, such as the following:

• Medical diagnosis by medical image classification
• Targeted marketing by social network filtering and behavioral data analysis
• Financial predictions by processing historical data of financial instruments
• Electrical load and energy demand forecasting
• Process and quality control
• Chemical compound identification

Computer vision is the ability of computers to extract information and insights from images and videos. With neural networks, computers can distinguish and recognize images similar to humans. Computer vision has several applications, such as the following:

• Visual recognition in self-driving cars so they can recognize road signs and other road users
• Content moderation to automatically remove unsafe or inappropriate content from image and video archives
• Facial recognition to identify faces and recognize attributes like open eyes, glasses, and facial hair
• Image labeling to identify brand logos, clothing, safety gear, and other image details

So how's that going Tesla ?

• Visual recognition in self-driving cars so they can recognize road signs and other road users

 

[stonecarver]

Why would this type of feature be on a home computer let alone a requirement. Sure for the business side of the world I get it but make it on a corporate edition of Windows 11.

Everything good ever made in this world there is historically to flip side on how to extort it. This feels like Microsoft's reaction to those keystroke data collection programs, here hold my beer.

 

[bit_user]

due to reliance on an arcane CPU instruction often used for AI ---neural networks---​

I just wanted to see and understand this subject a little more

I think you just fell into a trap.

The article's author was merely speculating, almost certainly on the basis of what his web search of that instruction turned up. The first piece of evidence I'll present is where he said:

"This could be the reason why Microsoft is quietly enforcing POPCNT as an additional CPU instruction"
​

Second, if you follow the link about using POPCNT in neural networks, it says nothing about Windows or even Microsoft. It's just a purely abstract article about an interesting application of that instruction.

I don't believe it has anything to do with AI or neural networks. I think @mitch074 hit the nail on the head: Microsoft merely decided to increase their minimum baseline for the CPUs they target, and the first instruction someone happened to encounter, on an older CPU, was POPCNT. That doesn't mean it's the only newer instruction or the primary motivation for MS increasing their baseline ISA target.

Finally, after reading most articles published on this site for the past year+, I've learned that many of these authors have a proclivity towards padding out their articles with flights of fancy that are loosely based in the actual facts of the matter.

 

[kano1337]

Was Win11 officially not supported on 7th gen and older Intel PC systems anyway?

I do not diminish AI, its exciting, but yet with what they have come up for the next gen PCs and OSes seems to be more like the buzzword spinned big time, than something groundbreaking for me otoh. A little performance uplift I expect from these technologies in most of the use cases of the everyday (most often not professional) PC user.

 

[bigdragon]

I know of some old Sandy Bridge systems still in use, but not anything from the Nehalem generation. Those are really old! I have to imagine all the extra crap going on in the background of Windows 11 would make those old chips completely unusable regardless of supported instructions.

Windows 11 may have removed some of the restrictions against 7000-series Intel CPUs. The i7-7700hq is not officially supported. However, Windows 11 happily installed to it without any modification to the install image or registry. There is no unsupported warning on the OS either -- only an ignorable little text warning in the installer. Updates arrive normally.

 

[bit_user]

I know of some old Sandy Bridge systems still in use, but not anything from the Nehalem generation.

Nehalem is the first generation that has the instruction! The newest Intel CPUs lacking it would be Core 2.

Those are really old!

Nehalem is when Intel adopted the Core i3/i5/i7 naming convention. They launched in Nov. 2008, which is old but (IMO) not crazy old. I still sometimes used a machine of that vintage (or maybe it was Westmere?) at work, up until a couple years ago.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Windows 11 may have removed some of the restrictions against 7000-series Intel CPUs. The i7-7700hq is not officially supported. However, Windows 11 happily installed to it without any modification to the install image or registry. There is no unsupported warning on the OS either -- only an ignorable little text warning in the installer. Updates arrive normally.

This has always been the case, AFAIK. I was able to install Win11, shortly after it came out, with an i7-6700k without issue.

 

[TerryLaze]

Could this have something to do with copilot being part of windows now? Maybe it uses this instruction in some way?

 

[Order 66]

Could this have something to do with copilot being part of windows now? Maybe it uses this instruction in some way?

I hadn't thought of that, but that's a good point.

 

[yeyibi]

Hey Microsoft, I found this for you!

num_1bits = (c * 01001001001ULL & 042104210421ULL) % 017;

Multiplication and modulo division are expensive operations. I think Hacker delight had a faster emulated popcount, but I don't remember.

Anyways, I use popcount daily, and thought that it was available since the 8086. Can't imagine life without it, or countx_zero.

 

[bigdragon]

Nehalem is the first generation that has the instruction! The newest Intel CPUs lacking it would be Core 2.

Yeah, I misread that. My bad! Still, I haven't seen any Nehalem chips in years. Side channel mitigations in new hardware pushed a lot upgrades.

This has always been the case, AFAIK. I was able to install Win11, shortly after it came out, with an i7-6700k without issue.

When Windows 11 first came out I recall getting a "CPU Unsupported" message that prevented install on the 7700hq. The 7700hq wasn't in one of the Surface devices so Microsoft didn't officially support it at the time. People in forums would complain about Windows Update giving them warnings about the CPU and support following modifications to force the install. The fact that none of that appeared back in December seemed like a change to me.

 

[bit_user]

Multiplication and modulo division are expensive operations.

Multiplication is pretty cheap, these days, but fair point about integer division. I didn't really look at it that closely, TBH.

I think Hacker delight had a faster emulated popcount, but I don't remember.

True, the above version isn't the one I was looking for.

 

[JeffreyP55]

A new POPCNT requirement was discovered for Windows 11 24H2, which will need to be met by every system that wants to upgrade to the 24H2 update.

Older systems now won't be able to update to newer versions of Windows due to reliance on an arcane CPU instruction : Read more

Windows 11 + i7 was not supported until the 5th generation. I have a 4790k and x97 motherboard. Neither support windows 11. Windows 10 it is until 08/25. Then you are on your own.

 

[mr.phil]

POPCNT is also handy when implementing disk space allocation algorithms, error correction, process scheduling, and compact data structures. Those are things that can be useful inside an operating system.

 

[scottscholzpdx]

I'm confused why this article exists, Windows 11 never supported any CPU older that Intel 8xxx or Ryzen 2xxx.

I have Windows 11 on an i5-4300u in a Thinkpad. It works perfectly fine. Once an instruction that is present on ix-5xxx is necessary then it wont work.

 

[Geef]

AI with PC that does not support POPCNT. "Hi I'm Clippy! Would you like help?" 📎

AI with current gen PC that supports POPCNT. "Hi I'm Clippy! Would you like help?" 📎

AI with next gen chip PC that supports POPCNT. "Hi I'm Clippy! I'm watching you." 👀 📎

AI Elon controls that may or may not support POPCNT.
“Colon Cologne, the fragrance that takes you beyond Uranus!” – Grok

 

[TerryLaze]

AI with PC that does not support POPCNT. "Hi I'm Clippy! Would you like help?" 📎

AI with current gen PC that supports POPCNT. "Hi I'm Clippy! Would you like help?" 📎

AI with next gen chip PC that supports POPCNT. "Hi I'm Clippy! I'm watching you." 👀 📎

AI Elon controls that may or may not support POPCNT.
“Colon Cologne, the fragrance that takes you beyond Uranus!” – Grok

As if rich people would spend any money, to watch you...let alone the amounts it would take to do it to everybody.
Also as if AI is even needed for that in the first place.

 

[abufrejoval]

Thar goeth my trusty Q6600! O faithful comrade of many Doom[ed] battles!

And yes, while there are still a few Penryns, Conroes and Meroms around here, few have been powered on for years.

But I don't think that operating systems should even contain floating point code let alone any onther accelerator instructions, they should stick to isolating and preserving their register files on task switches: Linus learned very early that using fancy CPU instructions like jumping to task state segements can have horrendous consequences, as Jochen Liedtke pointed out in excrucinating detail.

And as a rule: you don't change the OS compiler settings in a minor release that upates automatically--it breaks things and that's not permitted under any circumstances.

And that is even more the case when all they're trying to do is push machine learning onto people, who really do not want Microsoft's variant on their personal computers, especially when it's very likely to be even less safe then printing, something that M$ doesn't manage to secure in 42+ years of doing operating systems.

Microsoft's desperate search for consumer value in billions of ML investments does not justify what they are doing: people depend on their personal computers to work as intended by their owners not to fulfill M$ co-plot pipedreams!

If they don't know how to manage operating systems responsibly, that task needs to be taken off their hands, just like doing browsers.