Originally posted by RanASI'll likely do a fresh install of Windows 11 on a small SSD and use one of the Windows 10 Education keys my college has allocated to me on it.
I have done just that and it's working well, though I barely use it. No real complaints so far. Though I did notice how my browser's user agent string still has "(Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)" in it, even on Windows 11.
Going back to the minimum requirments ordeal, I was wondering, well why do I need a supported CPU if all the safety features that Microsoft has put into Windows 11 don't need it? Well, turns out, they're trying something called HVCI or Memory Integrity (which is also present in Windows 10 for the computers that support it) which seems to be the issue:
Originally posted by ArsTechnicaWindows 11 (and also Windows 10!) uses virtualization-based security, or VBS, to isolate parts of system memory from the rest of the system. VBS includes an optional feature called "memory integrity." That's the more user-friendly name for something called Hypervisor-protected code integrity, or HVCI. HVCI can be enabled on any Windows 10 PC that doesn't have driver incompatibility issues, but older computers will incur a significant performance penalty because their processors don't support mode-based execution control, or MBEC.
And that acronym seems to be at the root of Windows 11's CPU support list. If it supports MBEC, generally, it's in. If it doesn't, it's out. MBEC support is only included in relatively new processors, starting with the Kaby Lake and Skylake-X architectures on Intel's side, and the Zen 2 architecture on AMD's side—this matches pretty closely, albeit not exactly, with the Windows 11 processor support lists.
Even
a video Microsoft posted in one of their channels clarifies what's going on with these requirements. My CPU is an Intel Core i5-6600, which puts it exactly one generation behind support for MBEC, but two generations behind Microsoft's offical "support list".
Even so, there's a few reports that even with CPUs that support MBEC,
Windows 11 still carries a noticeable performance penalty compared to Windows 10. I just wonder if they're gonna make any benchmarks with CPUs that don't support MBEC so that they can measure how important having a supported CPU really is, that'd be neat to see.