dencorso Posted December 18, 2015 Share Posted December 18, 2015 Thanks a lot, Jody! You rock! Mystery solved: lack of PREFETCHW !!! This post (which cannot be not quite exact) from the thread I linked to at intel did suggest as much.It seems that it actually was the last of the instructions in question to be added by intel to its processors, but it sure was added earlier than Broadwell, despite the reference, because my i7-3770K (an Ivy Bridge) does support it and, in fact, if 8.1 and 10 required at least Haswells or Broadwells, the flop would have been way much bigger than what we have witnessed. PREFETCHW will be added in the Intel Broadwell family of processors, per 5th Gen Intel® Core™ Processors (Mobile U-Processor) Platform Brief. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted December 18, 2015 Share Posted December 18, 2015 If it turns out that CPUs lacking the PREFETCHW instruction also cannot run Windows 10, maybe it's time to stock up on machines that rely on them! --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dencorso Posted December 19, 2015 Share Posted December 19, 2015 It seems to me that Intel processors that are unable to run 8.1 and 10 lack PREFETCHW, which all multicore AMD processors do include, whereas most multicore AMDs that are unable to run 8.1 and 10 lack CMPXCHG16b, instead. However, at this point, this is little more than just a guess. I know for sure all Athlon XPs cannot run even 8.0, because they lack SSE2, among other things, but not all Athlon 64 X2 and later AMD processors are able to run 8.1 or 10 but all seem to be able to run 8.0... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dencorso Posted December 19, 2015 Share Posted December 19, 2015 LoneCrusader has kindly run Coreinfo 3.31 on his 4-core Bloomfield i7 (Nehalem microarchitecture) and attached the results here. Here is an extract of the relevant results for this thread's discussion: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 - 930 @ 2.80GHzx86 Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 5, GenuineIntel X64 * Supports 64-bit mode NX * Supports no-execute page protection PAE * Supports > 32-bit physical addresses SSE2 * Supports Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 CX16 * Supports CMPXCHG16B instruction LAHF-SAHF * Supports LAHF/SAHF instructions in 64-bit mode PREFETCHW * Supports PREFETCHW instruction I think it's safe to infer that all Nehalem and later intell processors can run 8.1 and 10. Which means those prcessors that cannot should have been launched before late 2008. This is a good start to identify when PREFETCHW was 1st included in the intel instruction set. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dencorso Posted December 19, 2015 Share Posted December 19, 2015 This post elsewhere presents Coreinfo data (which is misinterpreted there) for a Dell Dimension 5150 unable to run 8.1. Here's the relevant part: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Pentium D 820 CPU @ 2.80GHzIntel64 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 7, GenuineIntel CX16 * Supports CMPXCHG16B instruction LAHF-SAHF * Supports LAHF/SAHF instructions in 64-bit mode PREFETCHW - Supports PREFETCHW instruction The Pentium D 820 processor is a Smithfield, from May 2005 and Jody's Xeon is an Irwindale (from Sep 2005), both being derived from the Prescott architecture. This barackets the inclusion of the PREFETCHW instruction as having happened between very late 2005 and late 2008. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jody Thornton Posted December 23, 2015 Author Share Posted December 23, 2015 (edited) Well I went for it. My system is on Windows 8. Just applying updates and getting my apps to work again. I ran the upgrade over top Vista (and despite my usual hatred for upgrade installations, Windows 8 is running REALLY REALLY well.) Perfectly happy and I don't feel I'm missing anything that I can see from Windows 8.1. UXStyle, Classic Shell and most of my applications are installed. Just ridding of the Explorer ribbon, and I'll be all set. Edited December 23, 2015 by JodyT 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jody Thornton Posted December 23, 2015 Author Share Posted December 23, 2015 Here's Pale Moon with the FoxE9 add-on. Looking good! (at least for me) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dencorso Posted December 23, 2015 Share Posted December 23, 2015 I'm glad it worked, and you've got a satisfactory result! And thanks for the interesting journey you've got us into: I, for one, learned a lot from it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jody Thornton Posted December 23, 2015 Author Share Posted December 23, 2015 Thanks Dencorso. Of course the interesting thing will be is what happens to Windows Defender support as of next month. I'm hoping I'll still get updates, but we'll have to see. It's funny. Vista would have continued receiving updates for another year and a bit, but Windows 8 is already running snappier (after an upgrade installation even) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted December 23, 2015 Share Posted December 23, 2015 Here's Pale Moon with the FoxE9 add-on. Looking good! (at least for me) Congratulations on your successful transition... even if it did come at the expense of another Vista setup. If I may ask, what's that FoxE9 add-on, what does it do? --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TELVM Posted December 23, 2015 Share Posted December 23, 2015 If I may, it's an add-on to make Firefox (and Pale Moon) look like Internet Exploder 9: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxe9/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jody Thornton Posted December 23, 2015 Author Share Posted December 23, 2015 If I may, it's an add-on to make Firefox (and Pale Moon) look like Internet Exploder 9: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxe9/Like he said. And yes, I will miss my Vista installation, but I am unable to run my tax software on it, because Canada has added a security protocol that is now incompatible with Vista and XP for Netfile use. So that hastened my decision this week, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted December 23, 2015 Share Posted December 23, 2015 (edited) Like he said. And yes, I will miss my Vista installation, but I am unable to run my tax software on it, because Canada has added a security protocol that is now incompatible with Vista and XP for Netfile use. So that hastened my decision this week,Well there are still VM's ... ... and dual/multi booting ... jaclaz Edited December 23, 2015 by jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jody Thornton Posted December 23, 2015 Author Share Posted December 23, 2015 True, but I have to say Windows 8 is really snappy by comparison (I'd say even BETTER than Windows 7). So for now (lol) I'm glad I've switched. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted December 23, 2015 Share Posted December 23, 2015 True, but I have to say Windows 8 is really snappy by comparison (I'd say even BETTER than Windows 7). So for now (lol) I'm glad I've switched. Besides the fact that your impression/feeling is different from all measurements actually made (by NoelC), what I was suggesting was simply that there is no real reason to have it as a "switch" as it could be an "addition" instead. jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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