Solved Windows 11 24H2 has un-bypassable hardware requirements...

First-generation Windows on ARM PCs will not be able to run Windows 11 24H2​

mecanicogolf said:

Or just go away.

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spapakons said:

It remains to be seen if indeed 24H2 will make extensive use of PopCnt instruction or it is only a compatibility check to stop older computers running Windows 11. This was the case with the first edition of Windows 8. It required NX/PAE instruction to install and boot, but once you bypass the compatibility check you could run it on an unsupported Pentium 4 socket 478 CPU. Let's hope this is the case with the PopCnt instruction, just a compatibility check that can be bypassed.

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spapakons said:

In worst case I will buy a refurbished laptop which has the PopCnt instruction and give my test laptop to a friend or relative with Windows 11 23H2.

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spapakons said:

In worst case I will buy a refurbished laptop which has the PopCnt instruction and give my test laptop to a friend or relative with Windows 11 23H2.

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neves said:

SSE4A is AMD only, while SSE4.2 is supported by both Intel and AMD.

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spapakons said:

It remains to be seen if indeed 24H2 will make extensive use of PopCnt instruction or it is only a compatibility check to stop older computers running Windows 11. This was the case with the first edition of Windows 8. It required NX/PAE instruction to install and boot, but once you bypass the compatibility check you could run it on an unsupported Pentium 4 socket 478 CPU. Let's hope this is the case with the PopCnt instruction, just a compatibility check that can be bypassed.

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spapakons said:

Again let's hope this is only a hardware requirement for installation or upgrade. If most Windows 11 code doesn't use PopCnt instruction or SSE4.2 Microsoft would have to rewrite it to force this requirement. Not very likely to rewrite most of Windows 11 code.

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spapakons said:

If most Windows 11 code doesn't use PopCnt instruction or SSE4.2 Microsoft would have to rewrite it to force this requirement. Not very likely to rewrite most of Windows 11 code.

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BrianInEngland said:

It would just need to be a boot-time process. No PopCnt or SSE4.2, no boot.
Wouldn't require a huge change for that.

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POPCNT is useful for various workloads such as error correction, and even neural networks. According to Vaibhav Sagar, POPCNT can be used to help run binary convolutional neural networks, which are typically designed to run on lower-end devices, like smartphones and tablets. Neural networks normally use matrix multiplication, but a binary convolutional network runs using binary matrices.

This could be the reason why Microsoft is quietly enforcing POPCNT as an additional CPU instruction that all systems will need to support going forward if they want to keep using Windows 11. Having this requirement in place could mean that all Windows 11 machines starting with the 24H2 will be able to support binary neural networks. And Windows 11 24H2 is Microsoft's upcoming AI-focused patch coming later this year.

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Older systems now won't be able to update to newer versions of Windows due to reliance on an arcane CPU instruction often used for AI neural networks: Report

Thankfully modern-day Windows 11 machines already support this instruction.

www.tomshardware.com

Where does popcount come into play? It’s used to calculate the dot product of two binary matrices:

Code:

a = xnor(x, y)
b = popcount(a)
c = len(a)
dot(x, y) = 2 × b − c

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spapakons said:

They most likely use a new bootloader and installer requiring the PopCnt instruction. Both might be possible to bypass by replacing the relevant files with those from 23H2 version.

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