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I'm looking for the minimum CPU requirements for Windows 7. Specifically, I want to know if it requires SSE, SSE2, etc.

Wikipedia states that SSE2 was a requirement for Windows 8, but it doesn't say anything about Windoes 7.

I found this here:

The minimum requirements for Windows 7 are modest by today's standards:

  • 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  • 1 GB RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  • 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) -- just for the OS, not applications or data files
  • DirectX 9 graphics processor with Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.0 or higher
  • Internet access

Unfortunately, that doesn't say anything about specific CPU features required. Does anyone have the information?

cxxl
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1 Answers1

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In 2018 SSE2 came to be a requirement for newer Windows 7 updates too, but I'll take we are interested to the situation before that.

If you want to be very specifically CPU-focused, the 32-bit version only needs the CMPXCHG8B instruction that was already a must for XP plus supposedly RDTSC and an FPU.

But as noted by the current record holder of the oldest hardware that can run the OS, what's more likely to give you a bad time once you go far enough behind with the years is ACPI support. APM is no more since Vista, and until ~1998 (if not even later with all the bugs) it was the only thing motherboards reliably had.

Fun fact: W7 actually took the bother to fix a bug with the original Pentium (which SP1 has built-in).

mirh
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