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Now That Windows 8 Classic Support Is Ending Soon ...


Jody Thornton

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Thanks a lot, Jody! You rock! :thumbup
 
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.

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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...

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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.

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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. :)

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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.

 

My%20New%20Win8%20Setup.jpg

Edited by JodyT
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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)

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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

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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,

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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 by jaclaz
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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

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