While we still have at least two Windows 11 Moment updates left in the store (Moment 3 and Moment 4), Microsoft is already making some steady progress towards the next generation of Windows 12, and it’s not the official name yet as it seems to be referred to as Next Valley. Panos Panay, chief executive officer, explained that the next generation of Windows 11 and Windows 12 will be a combination of cloud-powered, AI-powered experiences, and Microsoft is slowly making some progress towards that. In security aspects too, the company is killing legacy components such as MSDT, as well as VBScript, which have been exploited in the past.
Microsoft is believed to be back in its three-year release cycle, which means that Next Valley or Windows 12, whatever you want to refer to as is likely to be released to the general public sometime in the second half (2H) of 2024.
Aside from the release date itself, another area that will surely generate a lot of interest is the system requirements for Windows 12. Windows 11 requirements are often considered quite strict as Microsoft considers CPUs, which are only a few years old. , as incompatible. Recent rumors have suggested that 14th Gen Intel Meteor Lake-S desktop processors will debut with support for Windows 12 out of the box. However, based on the evidence we have so far, that is very unlikely to happen as the expected release dates for Meteor Lake and Next Valley don’t seem to match. Moreover, there is almost no trace of Meteor Lake-S at the moment, which indicates that the processor requirements may not have been finalized yet.
Regarding some other requirements such as Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the German port of Deskmodder claims that the release requirements for the Security Cryptographic Processor will be the same as in Windows 11 i.e. TPM 2.0. Interestingly, Microsoft just released SHA-3 support in the latest Insider Build.
The report also notes that the Pluton coprocessor, which debuted with Ryzen 6000 mobile CPUs, may not be a common thing. Meanwhile, the minimum RAM requirement can increase to 8GB.
He. She He says (Google translation into English):
Some will surely wonder if the hardware requirements will continue to increase. According to our information, it should still be with TPM 2.0. It’s still very early for pluton
RAM requirements can increase to 8 GB.
To sum it up, these are the system requirements for Next Valley (Windows 12):
While there’s nothing they can do about the minimum disk space required, which is 64GB on Windows 11, Microsoft may give you the option to install ReFS. In fact, it seems that the company is making decent progress as it recently updated the version of ReFS. A rumor once suggested that Microsoft could update the system requirements for Windows 11 and make SSDs mandatory for booting. While that doesn’t happen, the Redmond giant might start doing it with Windows 12 (which would actually be a good thing to see how SSD prices continue to drop).
