Has anyone figured out how many devices are still running Windows that can't upgrade to 11?
The oldest Intel CPUs supported were released in 2017.
The oldest Intel CPUs supported were released in 2017.
Only 2 or 40% are supported.
So I think you're right, saying it's a motherboard thing may be slightly more accurate :)
How long should hardware be supported? Indefinitely? Should Microsoft still target 286's? Pentium III's?
Yes, some of them. Though of course there are people who make stink about Microsoft and not Apple because they don't use Apple products.
> How long should hardware be supported? Indefinitely?
Yes. Or at least approximately as long as Linux does. Especially since it's no longer the 80s/90s and we're not seeing anywhere near the kind of rapid and significant hardware improvements the PC industry saw back then [1]. Microsoft is an extremely successful company with 221,000 full time employees, they have the capacity to do this.
[1] Over the last couple decades, I've declined scheduled PC refreshes a couple times after checking the specs, because the "refreshed" PC was literally almost the same as my current one (like a small CPU bump and a bit more memory). For completely selfish reasons it made more sense to just keep the old one and maybe buy some more RAM than go through the trouble of migrating my stuff.
The only shocker on my machines is my first gen Ryzen build. I guess 8c/16t and 32GB RAM isn't enough to run Windows anymore?
I've got multi-socket, multi-core, many-gig-of-RAM boxes that can't run modern Linux kernels (and thus most modern Linux distros) due to lacking CPU features required these days.
Much better than "I've got an i7 why is this slow" "I don't know, it works great on my Pentium", where the first person has an i7-620UE, a 2.13 Ghz 2 core Arrandale (Westmere?) from 2010, and the second person has a Pentium Gold G7400, a 3.7Ghz 2 core Alder Lake from 2022. Turns out 12 years of improvements and moving from mobile to desktop makes a huge difference. Of course, someone with a pentium could also have a processor from 1993-2022, so that's a much worse name without qualifiers.
That Ryzen CPU launched in 2017, which means it existed 4 years before the newest Windows wasn't supported. Really, it's this time frame that surprised me.
What do we consider a modern kernel? Debian is still shipping a i386 port that should run on a Pentium II. It's old enough to order a beer at a restaurant.
"Nearly all x86-based (IA-32) processors still in use in personal computers are supported. This also includes 32-bit AMD and VIA (former Cyrix) processors, and processors like the Athlon XP and Intel P4 Xeon. However, Debian GNU/Linux bookworm will not run on 586 (Pentium) or earlier processors."
One obvious cut-off point is support for 64-bit software (the AMD64 ISA). Another is a minimum speed and memory capacity.
People are complaining because, in many cases, these "no longer supported" CPU models are faster than the allowed CPU models, and they accept more than enough RAM.
But there are still millions of 32-bit CPUs out there which could be used but are landfill fodder now. Think of all the e-waste!
> these "no longer supported" CPU models are faster than the allowed CPU models, and they accept more than enough RAM
There's far more to hardware requirements than clock rate and memory capacity. If the hardware doesn't support some feature deemed important adding another stick of RAM won't solve the problem.
IMHO, until there's a good reason to depend on a feature they don't have. For cpus, that's usually an instruction that makes things possible or much more efficient.
286s were obsoleted by the 386's 32-bit and virtual modes.
Pentium III was obsoleted by 64-bit mode, if not some version of SSE.
It looks like the 24H2 release of Windows 11 is going to require SSE 4.2, POPCNT is nice, and I guess they want to depend on it. Seems ok for an instruction that's been in processors for over a decade.
Personally, I don't find the TPM requirement essential, especially since windows seems to work fine without a tpm; whereas I'd bet the builds that rely on POPCNT won't work without it. One could hook the bad instruction exception and backfill with a software implementation to count bits, but I think it's ok to skip.
And yet it took nearly a decade for the 386s to displace them in the market.
But when you had to retire your 286, it was because it couldn't run 32-bit software. Or because you really needed to multitask some dos stuff.
And Apple stinks too, but we're not arguing that here.
How many 286s are out there?