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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Well a lot of people are looking at Windows 11, which launched in 2021 and required a ~2018 CPU. Especially when Intel's 8th generation chips were barely different from the ones going back years. Chips close to that cutoff are going to have awful support lifetimes from microsoft if you can't get updates past 2025.

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This is looking at it from the wrong side though. It isn't the hardware vendor ending support there, it's the software vendor.

PC hardware can be supported indefinitely because it's documented, more or less. Windows uses a hardware abstraction layer so the old drivers can be used with the new Windows. Hardware only stops being supported by Windows when Microsoft decides it, not Intel or NVIDIA or Broadcom.

The Linux community writes open source drivers, or the hardware makers do themselves, so they can be updated by the kernel developers when they make changes to the kernel and continue to work. You can put run the latest Linux kernel on a PC from 1995.

But for phones the hardware support comes as an opaque binary blob tied to a specific kernel version, so when that kernel falls out of support, the hardware is slag unless someone has the resources to reverse engineer it. Which they might if it was just the wireless or just the storage controller, but it's not.

I laughed out loud when the Ryzen 7 1700X (8c/16t @ 3.4GHz) in my main desktop didn't meet the minimum system requirements.

It's just 5 years old now, and I have a funny feeling it'll be more than powerful enough for a while yet.

They’re ways to get around the restrictions though I don’t know why you’d want to. Windows 11 is a virus

Windows is too much of a resource hog to be a virus.

I have a similarly new PC and found there were BIOS settings needed to allow it to get windows 11 -- some security stuff that wasn't turned on by default.

Of course, then I looked into what windows 11 provided and decided I'd wait a bit either way.

I initially upgraded a Ryzen 7 1700 system with the hold TPM module, then got an incredible deal on a 5700X. I was surprised how much I had to fiddle in the BIOS with a year old motherboard to get things like Secure Boot and memory isolation working.

It was something like 5 or 6 BIOS expeditions before I had all the right features enabled.

Windows 11 is meh... They fixed some of my issues with 10 and created new ones. I wouldn't rush anyone to adopt it, it's a Vista/XP/ME style release. I'm expecting Windows 12 to be the keeper.

I was in the same boat with the base 1700. It likely just needs a TPM module. My ASRock Fatality (sp) motherboard had a port for a module.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/where-to-buy-tpm-2.0-for-w...

Win11's line in the sand requirements aren't nearly as "bad" as Vista/XP/ME in terms of disruption. Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.

> Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.

That's a non-starter because Intel upsell ECC as an "enterprise"/"prosumer" feature and regular, non-high-end/workstation/server processors don't support ECC. Sadly Intel is still the CPU market leader, so that would have meant Win11 not being able to run on most existing hardware at launch.

Yes, how different are Intel's consumer CPUs from their Enterprise? Is ECC disabled physically in their CPUs or is it simply a software limitation?

AMD's CPUs have ECC support but the motherboard manufacturers don't support it.

Intel has been shipping TPMs in CPUs for a while. That begs the question, is Intel dictating requirements to Microsoft or is Microsoft dictating them to Intel?

> was in the same boat with the base 1700. It likely just needs a TPM module.

Oh dear, why is Microsoft upgrade assistant and documentation so misleading? I just got a new CPU!

I'm not sure they are.

I can go into the UEFI settings and enable fTPM on the system. It still doesn't make it see the system as supported.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...

It is only 2nd gen Ryzen and up.

P.S. By reverse logic, I have disabled (f)TPM to block the upgrade on some machines.

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