Chrome will soon lose support for some ancient CPUs

[gregmcc]

Chrome will soon lose support for some ancient CPUs

The Chromium development team announced that CPUs older than the Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 would not work with Chrome 89 and future versions...

www.techspot.com

If you’re one of the few people still using a PC with an x86 processor more than 15 years old, here’s another reason to upgrade: the devices will not work with future Chrome releases, starting with version 89 of the world’s most popular browser.​

The Chromium development team announced that CPUs older than the Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 would not work with Chrome 89 and future versions as they do not meet the new minimum instruction set requirement of SSE3 (Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3) support.

So, if you are still sporting an Intel Atom or Celeron M CPU, you’ll soon be counting Chrome as one of the many programs that are incompatible with your potato-like rig. The devices will no longer attempt to install the browser, while running it will result in the software crashing.

It’s noted that the change only affects Windows as Chrome OS, Android and, Mac already require SSE3 support.

 

[neoprema]

Will it also lose support for less than 16GB system RAM?

 

[Gordon_R]

Chrome stopped support for Windows XP ages ago. Few operating systems that I know can run efficiently on a Core 2 Duo CPU. Not sure how many people this would affect?

 

[backstreetboy]

Will it also lose support for less than 16GB system RAM?

Worked fine on my Rpi3 with 1gb of ram.

 

[JuliusSeizure]

Just download Chromium. It's an identical alternative that works on ancient PCs.

 

[gregmcc]

Just download Chromium. It's an identical alternative that works on ancient PCs.

Chromium are the ones that are making the changes. Chromium is the open source version. Chrome is just Chromium with extra bits added by Google.

 

[JuliusSeizure]

Chromium are the ones that are making the changes. Chromium is the open source version. Chrome is just Chromium with extra bits added by Google.

Sure, thanks for the correction.

But I'm pretty sure someone will work a way around it.

 

[John_Phoenix]

Sure, thanks for the correction.

But I'm pretty sure someone will work a way around it.

If chromium rips out the x86 instruction sets (code), then no, you can virtualise x64 code in a 32bit environment, but performance is going to be "modest" at best.