Update (2023-03-29):
Faster updates, more flexible with hardware
According to a new report from Windows Central Microsoft is developing something called “Core PC” for Windows 12 – internally codenamed Hudson Valley. It’s about a new way of organizing code libraries and other system components into self-contained packages that can be kept up to date individually.
The project has similar goals to the defunct Windows 10X, but will no longer attempt to scale back backward compatibility for traditional Windows programs. Instead, the system should be made more modular so that you only need to have the parts needed on a particular computer installed. The Core PC concept uses disk partitions for the various modules, which among other things enables significantly faster updates.
Another advantage is that it will be faster to reset a computer, for example to give a school computer that a student has had to a new student next school year. Microsoft hopes to achieve installations of Windows 12 on such PCs that take up 60-75 percent less space than Windows 11 and only work with web apps, Edge, Android apps and the Office programs.
For regular home users and individual professional users, Core PC should above all allow updates to be released more often and be faster to install, but also provide higher security.
Windows Central’s sources also claim that Microsoft is working on built-in AI features for Windows 12, optimized to run on modern computers with machine learning cores in the processor.
Previously (2023-03-02):
Windows 11 was released in October 2021, but even though it hasn’t even been a year and a half, rumors about Windows 12 have already started to emerge. MS Poweruser reports that the Twitter account @leaf_hobby has published and then deleted a post with what it claims is a list of specifications for Intel’s upcoming Meteor Lake-S processor family.
The list included information about pci express lanes, Wifi 7, removed support for avx512 instructions – and that “Windows 12” is on the list of supported operating systems.
There is no information on how big the update might be, and MS Poweruser notes that Windows 11 is still only installed on a fraction of all Windows computers. According to Statcounterwhich measures different platforms based on visitors to thousands of websites, Windows 11 today has just over 19 percent, compared to just over 73 percent for Windows 10 and – still – 5 percent for Windows 7.
