Windows 11

This article is about the operating system series developed since 2021. See Windows 11 (original release) for the original operating system release called "Windows 11".

Windows 11 is a series of Microsoft Windows operating systems that succeeded the Windows 10 series in 2021. It was originally announced in June 2021 and the initial version was released on 5 October 2021.

This is the first version of Microsoft Windows to not support the IA-32 architecture (32-bit x86 systems) as the operating system now requires a x86-64 processor with CMPXCHG16b, PrefetchW and LAHF/SAHF instructions. It is also the first version of Microsoft Windows to not include NTVDM meaning that 16-bit apps are unsupported and thus, can't run in Windows 11. Also, it is the first version of Microsoft Windows to not support devices with BIOS firmware as it only supports devices that use UEFI firmware although certain workarounds exist that can be used to install it on devices with legacy BIOS firmware. This is also the first version of Microsoft Windows to support x86-64 emulation on ARM64 systems.