Back when Windows 11 was first announced, Microsoft made it a point to mention that many modern CPUs will be unsupported due to the strict system requirements for running its next-gen OS.
In simpler terms, anything older than Zen+ and 8th generation Intel chips weren’t officially supported.
The software titan revised the hardware requirements a couple of months down the line, adding a handful of 7th generation Intel processors, but no new AMD chips were added to the list after this reconsideration.
But while the company imposes these strict requirements on users, one of its employees was caught on camera using an unsupported CPU.
This happened when Claton Hendricks, who is a Program Manager at Microsoft, was seen using the fairly old Intel Core i7-7660U processor that is not on the official list of supported chips. He was showing off the colorful new Task Manager running on a device equipped with this processor.
It is possible that the video capture was from a virtual machine, but that does not really matter as virtualization uses the underlying physical CPU.
Eagle-eye users were quick to spot this, and some were quick to criticize the company for these strict processor requirements in place.
Microsoft maintains that Windows 11 needs a modern CPU because of the MBEC feature, short for mode-based execution control. That said, while older processors are unsupported and these OS installations may not get updates in the future, it is still possible to install Windows 11 on these CPUs.
This latest episode only proves that the latest version of Windows still works on unsupported processors, even if the OS runs better and smoother on modern CPUs.
