As discovered recently, a change in Windows 11 24H2 makes impossible to install it on a computer without the POPCNT instruction. It is part of the SSE4.2, which is missing in AMD Turion II and Intel Core 2 Duo and older. Now NVIDIA follows the suit. The company announced that it will stop supporting processors that do not have the POPCNT instruction in GPU drivers. Starting with version 555, computers that do not meet this requirement will experience blue screens of death (BSODs) after installing this version of the NVIDIA drivers.
While the driver itself may be installed manually, it will not work. When Windows 11/10 will try to load such a driver, it will fail and the OS will fall into the blue screen of death with the SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED code.
Microsoft is strict with the new hardware requirement. Both Windows installer and system files now require POPCNT, so the installer won't start on an old device. As of this writing, there are no known methods to bypass this restriction except sticking with Windows 11 23H2, if you need something from the recent releases.
The POPCNT instruction is responsible for counting the number of bits set to 1 and is part of the SSE4.2 set for Intel processors or Advanced Bit Manipulation (ABM) for AMD processors. Finally, CPUs launched in the past ten years include this instruction set. While processors without it aren't officially compatible with Windows 11, there have been workarounds to install the OS on such devices until the 24H2 release.
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