I would not be surprised if the next Windows version has similar requirements as Windows 11. Microsoft normally does not drastic changes to the minimum requirements over the years. Before Windows 11 came out, the last time there was a large increase was for Vista. Answer from Froggypwns on reddit.com
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Tom's Hardware Forum
forums.tomshardware.com › home › systems
Question - Components to prepare for Windows 12? (And beyond?) | Tom's Hardware Forum
March 3, 2025 - Lunar Lake is essentially the low-power-consumption sibling of Arrow Lake, so its NPU can use far less power than using a GPU to do AI. FWIW the suggested RTX 3060 is estimated to have 102 TOPS (plus the Ultra 7 265k itself has 13 TOPS) so handily exceeds all the current guesstimates of Windows ...
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Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com › en-us › windows-hardware › design › minimum › windows-processor-requirements
Windows Processor Requirements | Microsoft Learn
Unless otherwise noted, Microsoft will continue to evaluate the processor list for a given OS release and update the list as new appropriate processors are available in market. Windows Server support and installation instructions for the AMD Rome family of processors
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Digital Trends
digitaltrends.com › home › computing › news
Possible Windows 12 hardware system requirements revealed - Digital Trends
March 28, 2023 - However, there have been few details ... that Windows 12 might support the Pluton coprocessor, which was first introduced on the Ryzen 6000 mobile CPUs in January 2022....
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AnandTech
forums.anandtech.com › home › hardware and technology › cpus and overclocking
Question - HammerBot Question: Will Windows 12 obsolete CPU's? | AnandTech Forums: Technology, Hardware, Software, and Deals
February 4, 2024 - Click to expand... I don't think that anyone would even try to legitimately run windows 12 on Nvidia's Tesla or Radeon's Terrascale. Intel's 3rd gen core and lower also only run DX11, but they're already not supported in win11
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Intel Community
community.intel.com › t5 › Processors › Windows-12-support › td-p › 1539535
Windows 12 support - Intel Community
November 1, 2023 - Hello everybody, I recently bought a new laptop with a Intel Core i5 8350U. I wanted to know if this processor will support windows 12 in the future.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/windows12 › windows 12's minimum system requirements
r/windows12 on Reddit: Windows 12's minimum system requirements
May 22, 2023 -

Back before its 2021 release it was announced that Windows 11 would limit official support to 14nm Intel 8th gen chips released after Sep 2017 & 12nm AMD 2nd gen Ryzen chips released after Apr 2018.

Assuming Microsoft hardens this requirement to completely disallow manual install of Windows 12 on anything older than 7+ older hardware will you keep running Windows 11 until its 122 month end of support by Dec 2031 or upgrade to newer parts upon the 1st 12 months of release?

Personally I'd keep Windows 11 running "as is" until the end of 2031 then buy into a 0.7nm (A7) ARM PC released within the 1st half of 2032.

Hopefully, a decade's R&D will make ARM SoCs ~80% & legacy x86 chips ~20% of all PCs for future Windows.

Find elsewhere
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The Verge
theverge.com › microsoft › news › tech
Intel and Microsoft seem to be hinting at Windows 12 | The Verge
March 1, 2023 - While the tweet has since been deleted, VideoCardz notes that Meteor Lake is expected to include 20 PCIe Gen5 lanes and support for Windows 12. We asked Intel to comment on the leak, but the company refused.
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The requirements will be the same that they are for win10, TPM and whatever their logic for CPUs is is going to be the same. Of course this depends heavily on how long it will take for 12 to come out.
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I remember days way earlier than Win XP, axtually well earlier than PC Something like Tinex-Sinclair with 2MB of RAM later on upgraded to 16MB and among other tings playing flight simulator with graphics made up of letters and numbers but also programing CNC machines with it using audio I/O from which programs were loaded from cassette player. The 386SX and the 387 to replace the need of a 386DX (incl. math coprocessor)... And Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and Borland C++; those machines were quite powerful though; they were literally monsters in comparison to 8 bit systems. On them you could do all the things you can on current computers, except for some particular computations and animating and gaming at real life graphics settings. Programmers were much better in those days. Today we have cards with 16000 cores which get only 50 FPS on some games. Truth be told, software is more important than hardware, because if a piece of software is very bad it may not run well even on incredibly fast hardware; yet, if it is written well it could run nicely with minimal resources. For example, Crysis 1 did not at any one point use more than 2 GB RAM and we all know how great its graphics were. Xpand Rally had incredible graphics and would run well on a GeForce2 and 256 MB RAM. (I've run both games personally). We exist in a world of incredibly fast hardware and incredibly bad software, currently. And before many years the hardware was incredibly slow, yet the software - much better.
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Windows Forum
windowsforum.com › forums › windows help and support forums › windows news
Windows 12: Release Date, Features, and System Requirements Revealed | Windows Forum
December 17, 2024 - While Microsoft hasn't officially ... to take center stage, users will likely need: Processor: At least 1 GHz, 64-bit architecture, with two or more cores....
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Quora
quora.com › Will-the-11th-Gen-Intel-processors-be-compatible-with-the-upcoming-Windows-12
Will the 11th Gen Intel processors be compatible with the upcoming Windows 12? - Quora
Answer (1 of 2): Yes, of course they are. Be a really bad move on Intels part to not make their latest cpu's incompatible with the latest OS that is used by millions.
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Eleven Forum
elevenforum.com › windows support forums › general support
Windows 12's Minimum Requirements: 16 GB RAM? | Windows 11 Forum
January 20, 2024 - 4GB, 8GB, 12GB none of that will matter. Windows 12 will require TPM3.0 and an AI enabled processor. So you will need to buy ANOTHER system to replace your aging 2023 system that can't be upgraded from Windows 11 or 10 anyway. Microsoft is a marketing firm now and not a software development house.
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Beebom
beebom.com › windows-12
Windows 12: Speculated Release Date, Expected Features, & Leaks | Beebom
October 15, 2025 - Currently, we have not heard much on the hardware requirements front for Windows 12. However, for Window 11 24H2, Microsoft is adding a CPU cut-off that would prevent much older PCs to boot the 24H2 build. The new update requires the CPU to support the “POPCNT” instruction. Thankfully, processors released after 2010 already support the said instruction so that won’t be a big issue.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/windows11 › is there something up with windows 11 & intel 12th gen processors?
r/Windows11 on Reddit: Is there something up with Windows 11 & Intel 12th Gen Processors?
January 9, 2023 -

[SOLVED]

We have a mid to large fleet (7k+ machines) with a mix of 10th, 11th and 12th Gen Intel processors. We've been on Win 10 for ages and recently started upgrading to Win 11 via Intune. Shortly after upgrading our early adopters, a large percentage of them reported severe performance issues resulting in the system being virtually unusable requiring multiple restarts throughout the day. In diving into the details, all of them have 12th Gen Intel processors and one person went back to a system with a 10th Gen processor that, when upgraded, worked fine.

The feedback from our testers, is the system performance tanks whenever they're in a Teams meeting (whether or not video is enabled on either end). A few people reported that this happens when working in Excel even in small XLSX or CSV's to the point they now use Excel for the web exclusively.

I've been able to reproduce this and while it's fairly consistent, I can't necessarily reproduce at will, but it's essentially a guarantee it'll happen, just a matter of when.

Searching has yielded some interesting results (further below) but it's dated information so I'm starting fresh hopes of catching more fish.

Has anyone else encountered this? Any troubleshooting advice and/or recommendations are greatly appreciated! (Read: Any WPR/WPA guru's lurking here?)

Hardware: Predominantly Dell Latitude 5431 with 12th Gen Core i7-1270P a few Dell Latitude 5521 12th Gen Core i7-10850H all with 32GB of RAM and 512GB SSDsSoftware: Very light with Windows, Office 365, Defender for Endpoint, Adobe Reader or Acrobat. Very basic & plain builds with not a whole lot going on.

Other Resources:

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/teog3d/12th_gen_performanceprioritisation_issues/

  • https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1027852/windows-11-22h2-thread-director-issues-with-intel

[SOLUTION] Applying all updates available through Dell Command Update (DCU) or Dell SupportAssist (DSA) solved the issues. Updates varied by machine, however these 3 updates kept coming up:

  1. BIOS

  2. Intel Integrated Sensor Solution Driver

  3. Intel UHD/Iris Xe Graphics Driver

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Reddit
reddit.com › r/buildapc › 12th gen processor, windows 10 or 11
r/buildapc on Reddit: 12th gen processor, windows 10 or 11
July 25, 2022 -

I've read up on things, but I'm new to this and confused on a few things, so I was hoping for some help.

For one, I was told by a family friend that with my build I should upgrade to a 12th gen processor, but I'm struggling to find what all is a 12th gen processor. Is it the i7 or the i9? Is it any of the specific ones in the i7 or i9? Because I originally had an i5-1200kf or whatever it's called, I've changed it since then so I am sorry if that's the wrong name. I have a build that I'm thinking of buying but I'm struggling to find an os without there being some arguement of price, and what kind of processor to use what with? I've read and seen that the 12th gen processors work better with windows 11 then 10 because you're not using it to its full potential?

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Kc3Gnt

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So as u/RiftPenguin mentioned, as you won't be overclocking, there's not a lot of benefit to using a 12700K in this setup. There IS a benefit to using a 12600K in a non-overclocking setup, as the 12600K has a significant step-up in specs versus the rest of the non-K i5's (I've actually been referring to it as an "i6" because I don't think calling it an i5 is completely accurate as it is such a spec jump rather than just a clockspeed bump). I don't agree that the 12400F is the right option for you - I think that's too much of a step-down, but I think a 12600K, or 12700/12700F is a good fit. Windows 11 should be the choice for you if you're going to be using a CPU with e-cores (in the 12th gen, 12600K and above all have e-cores). This is because the e-cores are specifically designed to handle background tasks so that your main performance cores can be there to handle user-dictated tasks (the e-cores get drafted and used when necessary, but for the most part, they're there to handle the background crap). However, when you have cores that are purpose driven but still technically general purpose cores (i.e. they're designed to be slower, more efficient cores for background processes, but CAN process anything - just slower), you need to be able to route the instructions to the cores properly. Windows 11 can do this. Windows 10 can't (and there's apparently no intention to patch in the ability to do this). So because Windows 10 goes at the cores sequentially, it's possible that you could get user instructions going to the e-cores, and background tasks going to the p-cores. So like, let's say that we have 10 instructions. 6 user, 4 backgound And they are in order: User, background, User, User, User, Background, Background, User, User, Background. A 12600K on Windows 10 would process them thusly: Core 1 (P-core): User Core 2 (P-Core): Background Core 3 (P-Core): User Core 4 (P-Core): User Core 5 (P-Core): User Core 6 (P-Core): Background Core 7 (e-core): Background Core 8 (e-core): User Core 9 (e-core): User Core 10 (e-core): Background Most of the user instructions, as you can see, get processed properly (and it's actually more complicated than this, because it's possible that Win10 might route things to lower core numbers as instructions finish and are made ready for new tasks, to say nothing of hyperthreading, but for demonstration purposes, this should be more-or-less accurate). And the background tasks that get handled by the p-cores are completed faster, so no big deal. But two of the user instructions here get processed by the max 3.6GHz e-cores, rather than the 4.9GHz p-cores. Windows 11 on the other hand, identifies which instructions are user-created, and which are background tasks and sends them to the proper cores appropriately. It's not a HUGE deal, but it's performance left on the table.
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12th gen Intel is any processor that begins with a 12###. 12400, 12600, 12700, etc. you probably didn’t need to change your CPU. from what i’ve read online, there’s not a huge difference in performance between Intel gen 12 on Windows 10 or 11.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/windows12 › windows 12 & new computer
r/windows12 on Reddit: Windows 12 & new computer
February 28, 2024 -

I want to know if anything has changed in the last 5 months regarding buying a new computer and Windows 12.

As of today, I'm assuming Windows 12 will be coming out early 2025. If this is true, would it be best to wait to buy a new computer with Windows 12 already installed so that it meets the Hardware requirements for Windows 12 OR will it be easy to upgrade?

Thanks!

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Quora
quora.com › Will-Windows-12-have-the-same-system-requirements-as-Windows-11-for-whenever-Windows-12-gets-released
Will Windows 12 have the same system requirements as Windows 11 for whenever Windows 12 gets released? - Quora
Answer (1 of 5): Hmmm… my crystal ball seems to be giving me nothing but static today My tarot cards appear to be missing half the deck I don’t drink tea, so I don’t have a tea leaves to read And there does not appear to be line on my palm that has anything to do with Windows versions So at t...