That is really the difference between Win 10 and Win 11: Requirement for UEFI, TPM 2.0 and a CPU that does AVX2 and FMA3, and some kind of hardware-assisted virtualization.

UEFI allows them to rewrite their entire bootup codebase with only one target. Literally hundreds of megabytes of sourcecode will be removed from their tree, some of it dating back to the 80's, and replaced with something that is much, much smaller and cleaner.

TPM 2.0 and hardware-assisted virtualization allow them to move the kernel one level up in the privilege hierarchy, while properly verifying it during boot to eliminate entire categories of exploits and providing trusted computing that might actually work this time. (Not entirely positive, but it's a desirable feature for them.)

And having all the cpus that can support the OS also support the good vector instructions greatly raises the baseline against which most software is compiled. This is an often underlooked point: The benchmarks and the most performance sensitive programs might get multiple code paths or versions for different cpus, but by far the most software made for Win 10 still only targets a very low baseline. Even if it's not 32-bit, most programs only target the ancient SSE2 (!) because that's the baseline that's quaranteed to exist if you have a 64-bit cpu, never mind it's over 20 years old now.

I find it hard to believe dropping legacy boot support saves hundreds of megabytes of any data in the OS, let alone source code. (If anything, the UEFI code is orders of magnitude larger / closer to that size, than legacy boot support.)

I could believe that dropping legacy boot support drops a lot of complexity and arcane, old code that's no longer as well-understood. However the actual footprint of that code can't be large. The boot sector is only 512 bytes, then you chain to a secondary and maybe tertiary step in the boot but those are measured in kilobytes or megabytes, hardly hundreds of megabytes (compiled).

But the fact is once the boot process has completed there's no longer any reason to refer back to any of the stuff that happened during the legacy boot while the operating system is running normally; by that point how the boot was accomplished is a non-issue. So it's not like, for example, supporting outdated/obscure hardware where you have to keep a bunch of drivers around.

> But the fact is once the boot process has completed there's no longer any reason to refer back

The instruction pointer is hardly the only state here. Doesn't the __SM__ structure (and the mess that came before) cascade into a bunch of configuration? It seems to me that it really could look like keeping a bunch of drivers around.

I realize that sounds a bit like a Monty Python critique of the Romans, but there’s no way I would/could use the platform as a daily workstation professionally. It served its last days as a home servant droid well, but just. It’s longevity in a low-demand role was only possible by augmenting it with an array of SATA SSDs and a hypervisor. I finally put it down a while back (and still had one backup mobo NIB for it). All the above relatively lightweight functions it was performing can be done with better performance on a far smaller footprint for size/power consumption/noise today. Those attributes are part of an improving performance profile. People talk about a performance plateau, which I’ve pushed back on in other posts as really being a demand plateau for many of its advocates. Case in point, using the phenom platform as a daily workstation. If one can even think about pulling that off, it can only be because their expectations have dropped very low for performance or their needs haven’t changed since Phenom was in its prime. Yeah it runs the old workloads like it always did (and why would it not? Even better when augmented with more modern hw/sw), but no way under the sun would I be able to overlay my current demand profile on a phenom platform and have anything but swamped resources and interminable delays. I say this as someone who fully appreciates the awesome power we have in a 5v/2A RPi smaller than a deck of cards, and what can be done a larger platform drawing less than 60w today, let alone what can be done with 1000w. The phenom platform is highly inefficient in comparison to the tools now at your disposal.

Maybe a keychain ornament.

Windows 10 will be widely used in 2031. You're not going to drop support for it and old CPU regardless of Windows 11 existence.

Would that really look so bad? Even the Linux kernel dropped 80386 eventually.

Windows 10 feature updates occasionally phasing out hardware support after a few years wouldn't seem wrong at all in my eyes, they could easily explain it as a trade-off necessary for getting "10 forever". And Windows users were already used to not getting their feature update immediately on older hardware, an eventual escalation from late to never wouldn't have been surprising at all.

The boundaries you ask for have already been in place, long before 11.

> providing trusted computing that might actually work this time.

Ahah, sure. <Pinky & the Brain tune starts>

One follow-on question - any insights into how what you wrote above explains why Microsoft dropped support for AMD Zen in Win11 (Zen+ and higher are only supported)? Looking at Wikichip, it doesn't seem like there's a feature missing, so perhaps there's an unfixable bug in Zen?

Only SSE4.2. It supports Intel CPUs without AVX2 since that was missing from some Celeron/Pentiums.

So Microsoft is going all in with hardware based security while everyone is still recovering from Spectre and Meltdown and dropping in additional layers of software fix CPU security flaws? Is there a betting pool somewhere on how long that will take to backfire?

I think I might upgrade one VM and see. Then leave most of my computers alone for now. It will take them a bit to shake out the quirks on this. It took them about 2 cycles to get win10 into a usable state. Which is fairly typical of them 'wait until service pack 2'.

Why? It's not like Windows 10 will suddenly stop working for you. That will keep being supported until 2025 which, at 10 years total, is quite plenty. Sure, you won't get any of the new shiny features of Win 11 but if you're PCs are so old, then you won't need them anyway.

Also, feel free to switch you and your family to Linux.

To be fair, Windows 10 will be 10 years old at that time and their PC will be over 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time. 11 year old HW is not very energy efficient and is often vulnerable to various side channel attacks that need SW mitigations which make them even slower. Newer HW is more secure, while being more energy efficient to boot. Even if Microsoft would continue support for ancient hardware, the chances are Nvidia and AMD would drop driver support for what they consider to be legacy hardware, like they alwasy do.

I also keep my 15 year old PC (Core 2 Quad) going for my parents but I moved it to Linux as I can't expect Microsoft to keep supporting such old hardware for free forever and at some point, the SW and HW industry have to keep moving forward and that sometimes means removing support for legacy stuff even if that means cutting some users with old hardware off (they still can keep using their systems after all, just not run the latest and greatest SW).

Is Apple doing better officially supporting hardware overs 10 years old?

No its not. For casual use, 15 year old PC is very much fine and works perfectly in many use cases ie for our parents. You may swap for SSD but that's it, it can be blazingly fast for the tasks required.

Forcing everybody to move into Linux when they can barely handle Windows is quite a stretch, there might be licences to software which won't work, same for hardware. Lets not forget whole world isn't on HN level of computer expertise to debug issues.

I doubt it. The first Athlon 64 was launched late 2003.

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can keep using whatever HW and OS you have as long as you wish. What's your point?

It's a rolling release, so with 21H1 it's only half a year old.

And I don't care what they do. It will be the last Windows for me.

To be fair, the PC won't be that old. Every single machine with Zen (1st gen Ryzen and Threadrippers), for example.

Come, now, we all know it's mostly hobbyists keeping 15+ year old PCs running with Linux

I had a bunch of old Dell Precision workstations and I eventually got shot of them because my electric bills were becoming more and more eye-watering. I built a cheap PC that (with virtualisation) can carry out all these old machines workloads and more, and my power bills were a fraction of what they were previously. Quite an eye opener for me with regards to how energy efficient new stuff is.

I love fighting planned obsolescence and reducing e-waste by repairing and keeping stuff working as long as possible but at some point old hardware should be replaced if funds allow it for the sake of energy efficiency and the environment.

Aye, I was thinking more about older desktop machines rather than laptops, which by their nature are designed to be as power efficient as possible to extend how long you can run off of just the battery.

And again just to restate to others, it's worth upgrading if you can afford it. After I dumped those old Dells, I reckon I saved the nearly the price of a whole PC each year after kitting out with newer gear (until the price of electric went up again).

Apropos Windows 11, it seems there may be ways around the TPM requirements, though not ideal:

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm...

What I'm trying to say: 10 years is not that much for computers these day?

While this is true, Windows 8.1 started to pester me about my hardware constantly on an older (but not old at the time) PC when it was getting towards EOL with an obnoxious popup.

I think there weren't that many advances in raw speed. The only thing it is missing is HEVC hardware decoding (i don't remember if it has h.264, possibly not)

What I'm trying to say: 10 years is not that much for computers these day?

It's hard to do that on the "rolling release" Win10 model, which is actually why I liked it. There was sort of an implication that if it was "the last version of Windows" then I probably would be fine with my current hardware for quite a while.

But major version upgrades have always had the risk of your hardware going obsolete with them.

Just smells like an excuse for forced obsolescence to me.

It could very well be that old timers behind Windows 10 are getting tired of the new blood getting in their way. So they let things progress in a way that would let them stab the Windows 11 people in the back and swoop in to save the day with Windows 12.

During the development of Windows 8 this code was discovered by a select and secret group of people. However, it was impossible to stop the scripts, silently executing on servers which are running in inaccessible concrete enclosures in Redmond since the 90s.

Cutting power supply or opening the enclosure to get to these servers would severely damage other critical hardware so they started soft countermeasures. Unaware developers would spread Windows 10 as the "last" Windows release but the operation to mitigate the Windows 11 terror could not be endangered by exposing this information.

To avoid global customer confusion, they chose their own strategy to deal with the sudden upgrade to "Windows 11" in 2021. They took the narrative into their own hands and jumped from Windows 8 directly to Windows 10, inventing some plausible story about why Windows 9 was missing. This way, the automated upgrade to Windows 11 could be masqueraded as their own choice

Edit: ok wait this could be an episode of Silicon Valley although I haven’t see the last season

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/394724/why-is-there-a-window...

Instead of getting Windows 10 support on that hardware indefinitely now they're done in 2025.

Mostly around Windows 11-ready machines.

So I agree with marketing experts, but Apple's probably not the catalyst, selling laptops is.

- Rushed

- No quality

- Regressions

- Bugs

As you say, there is no apparent technical goal behind Windows 11.

See this list of processors:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...

and this blog post:

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/06/28/update-...

I can empathize. As a consumer, though, I'm not sure I like it. I've got a lot of machines on Windows 10 LTSC that will be looking for a new OS in 2029, that may or may not require a hardware replacement...

I would welcome it if the freed resources were actually used to make Windows better for the user, but I doubt that will be the case.

This is extremely revisionist. Microsoft did a two-tiered badging program for Vista: Vista Capable and Vista Ready. They originally only had a single tier: Vista Ready.

Vista Ready hardware had WDDM drivers, adequate RAM, and capable enough graphics to run Aero. Such hardware could run any version of Vista. Vista Capable badging was introduced later which meant the hardware could only really run Home Basic which didn't support Aero. This badging program was for hardware sold contemporaneously with Vista's lease.

Millions of Vista Capable machines were sold that were honestly barely able to run even the Home Basic version of the OS. OEMs ended up having to offer downgrades to XP because of Vista's performance problems. Out of the box it ran slower than XP on the same exact hardware. Lots of third party software ran slower on Vista vs XP.

Vista was a terrible release of Windows. People that had problems with it weren't just people with old hardware upgrading. If you ran it on a high end system you probably didn't run into many of its performance issues. It basically brute forces it's way to usability. For many millions of others Vista was a shit show.

On the other hand, Vista did provide a mass market platform that could be a great scapegoat for the 64-bit transition. Everyone needed new drivers anyway.

As I recall, the XP-64 product was basically a painted over Windows Server release that was basically a non-starter.

Feels like launching something will always be seen as a positive. Or are there examples that say otherwise?

Like at what point is launching anything ever seen as a negative because it seems even the people in charge of the biggest disasters seem to do fine afterwards and just move on to a job at the next megacorp no problem.

It could just be a coincidence that macOS went from being version 10 to 11 last year, but it could very well not be.

Because in 2020, after many years at 10, macOS bumped its version up to 11. [1]

[1]: https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur/

But regardless, no one ever really mentioned the numbers. There was a hard announcement of the new OSX/macOS version every year with a flashy new name, first cats, then California locations. I don't think anyone ever considered OSX a rolling release in the same way Windows 10 was.

(GCC too, and, technically, X)

Then we got MacOS 11 and, well, here we are.

Fun fact: Microsoft never said this. Instead it was picked up by the media somehow and Microsoft simply chose never to correct anyone on it. My source is the Security Now podcast.

I'd respect them more if they just said "yeah, we said it would be the last one, but you know what... We reckon we can do better. This one goes to ELEVEN!"

There, that's your marketing done as well, Microsoft. So they changed their minds. Wow, it's almost like they're human beings or something! It wouldn't be nearly as noteworthy as denying it is already proving to be...

Also, how much influence do board members have on code of an OS anyways? All code must be written in Rust type of decisions. You must refactor these 10 lines into a function to be used later kind of decisions? That seems way too boots on the ground for a 30k' view type of position/job description.

My comment about "building things cleanly" is more about making a clean break from the past. It's not in their DNA, and since Windows 11 is doing that, I expect they'll hit some bumps in the road.

As for being a "one-off" issue was whether the bugs resulting from the clean break process are just a few, or if there is a whole host of issues that are about to crop up due to the big changes that have been made.

Windows 11 is technically simpler than 10[0], (not sure what the LOC counts are like though), but when changing/removing a bunch of things, I expect they will have issues. It's hard to do when your history is adding things for new features and keeping old code for compatibility - different process & different thinking.

[0] - I'm ignoring WSL here as a whole because I'm not familiar with the architecture yet.

[1]: https://twitter.com/vhanla/status/1434730813183209472

I'm using Windows 11 Enterprise and upgraded from Windows 10 Enterprise with no activation prompts etc. (VS/MSDN W10 Enterprise key from work)

Supposedly that isn't something Microsoft actually said. A "random member of the press" started that.

FOMO looking at Apple? I don't know.

Making it slightly whataboutism-ish, the same thing happened with Apple. When Apple transitioned from PoerPC to Intel, they kept 10.x because changing architectures kinda sorta wasn't a big deal for Apple. Same happened with 32bit -> 64bit transition. Same with HFS->APFS transition. It was no big deal.

With Mac OS 11 though? It's the same OS that is slowly circling down the drain after years of neglect. The only thing that is different is the new architecture. Which wasn't a big deal 15 years ago, and now for some reason it is.

Same thing at Microsoft? "We have to be seen as moving forward with a system we have no idea what to do about"?

S/he who pays the bill will have his will.

The rolling release can not hide that Windows had internal architecture rot driven by those who paid the bills (add-tech & stasi-spy-department).