RayeR wrote on 2025-01-20, 14:56:

A bit missing point of running W11 on such old HW. One may pick up some old multiprocessor server board from scrap and run W11 there. Probably even there'se some limitation that W11 requires some adv.Instruction set like SSEx so no way on Ppro/PII/PIII etc.

I think since around 2018 virtually everything started requiring SSE2. This requirement also applied to Win7 as well as XP (via POSReady 2009), which before that point had not required such. Other software also gradually started requiring SSE2 to run since then.

Don't know if this requirement had anything to do with Meltdown/Spectre as it was also around that year when those vulns were disclosed, and there were discussions about possible performance degradation as a result of mitigating them.

I don't think it has something to do with spectre/meltdown, that was fixed by modified microcode and added some instructions for cache flushing. I rather think that simply most of user base computers just had a cpu with sse2 capability so it became a standard to utilize it. There are some cases where special noSSE SW versions are still provided like Roytam's web browsers (he makes such legacy builds) bus if there's SSE uses somewhere in OS kernel then no way. But I'm not sure if really is, maybe only in some libraries that are not critical for system run. But in case of W11 I guess it's also in kernel, just too new...

Rasz you still around?
Made pretty big progress on the p2b

And I'm fairly sure the Asus asic as97127f is just a bunch of simple logic that's in the bx reference schematic bundled into one chip.

Modified BIOSes for ASUS P3B-F, P3V4X, P3V133, CUBX, CUBX-E/L and P3C-E