Will everybody please calm down! As in the norm before a major Windows 10 update, Microsoft has updated the processor requirements. Or rather, the documentation as a whole for the feature update.
We already know that support for 32-bit processors is on its way out.
Starting with the Windows 10 May 2020 Update.
And now we have an idea of the exact processors that this version will support.
Microsoft has documented these changes in the Windows Processor Requirements document, which lists all the new chips that are meant for the new update. And as things stand, the only new addition is the AMD Ryzen 4000 series of processors.
No surprises here, as Intel has already been producing its 10th generation CPUs for a while now, so that hasn’t changed. The CPUs listed for Intel include up to this latest release of chips — Xeon, Atom, Celeron and Pentium all included, alongside the Core series.
AMD processors also include up to 7th-generation processors, including Ryzen, Athlon, Opteron, and of course, EPYC. For some reason, the AMD Athlon 3000 is still missing, even though it was recently announced at CES this year.
But it’s all good.
What’s more surprising is that the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c and 8c processors are missing. Oversights, most likely. The page only shows the Snapdragon 850 and Snapdragon 8cx.
The Processor Requirements page is really just a way for Microsoft to list which versions of Windows 10 are optimized for new processors. Because, after all, the only actual minimum requirement for the OS is that it’s running on CPU that is 1GHz or faster that is compatible with certain instruction sets.
With the Windows 10 May 2020 Update released to developers on MSDN yesterday, and it already being available for OEMs to deploy on their latest hardware, this was the perfect time for this.
To refresh the processor requirements for the new operating system.
