Microsoft Increases CPU Instruction Set Requirements, Affects Edge Browser

TapTechNews May 17th news, Microsoft is gradually increasing the requirements for CPU instruction sets. For example, the new version of the Win11 system requires the CPU to support the POPCNT instruction set, and devices lacking such support will not be able to install Windows 11 24H2.

In addition, a few days ago, Microsoft officially updated the Microsoft Edge support documentation and announced that after the release of version 126, it will stop supporting CPUs lacking SSE3. Such devices will not receive any more updates in the future.

According to Microsoft's official release plan, the official version of Microsoft Edge 126.0 is planned to be launched on June 13, 2024. At that time, old CPU users who use CPUs that do not support the SSE3 instruction set may only continue to use their existing versions.

TapTechNews found that SSE3 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 3), also known as PNI, is an instruction set created by Intel for IA-32 architecture processors and introduced for the Pentium 4 series processors in 2004, and AMD has also started to add support for SSE3 since the Athlon 64 processor E series in 2005, and almost all x86 processors released since then also have the new SSE3 instruction set function.

The most notable new feature of SSE3 is horizontal register integer operations, while SSE and SSE2 before that could only operate vertically. A further feature is that simultaneous addition operations, subtraction operations, etc. of multiple values during instruction execution, and then storing the results, etc., can all be completed in a single register, so SSE3 can be implemented in a simpler way for simultaneous multiple and large-scale DSP and 3D-like operations.

It is worth noting that the Edge browser no longer supports older systems such as Windows 7, Windows 8.x, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012/2012R2, etc. These versions can currently only run the 109.0 version of the Edge browser.