Worked on my test machine, manufactured a decade ago (i7 with SSE4.2): (WinPE11 24H2 Build 10.0.26058.1000)
Also We shouldn't forget that x86 isn't exclusive Intel/AMD land There are also VIA CPUs NANO C and EDEN C are OK And Zhaoxin ZX C (and newer I guess) are OK as well.
Everything is possible, but you have to ask if it's worth/practical. Early 25xxx builds (like 251xx or 252xx) are decently usable in such old machines (provided you have a [pata] SSD and enough ram, say 4GB at least), but late 253xx already slow enough to make them annoyances rather than something useful. Perhaps assuming you do the job, possibly it will be destroyed on the first cumulative update... So it would be an entertaining challenge for coders, but nothing else.
Because 1st gen Core-era like youve mentioned (Arrandale and Clarkdale) Pentiums and Celerons didnt have support yet for SSE4.1 and SSE4.2 at that time until Sandy Bridge was introduced.
NVM. You're right, seem that Intel bothered to purposely disable them to differentiate the product. Intel never stops surprising AMD people like me.
My next plan to test Xeon E5 CPU has SSE 4.1 and SSE4.2 on 1356 - v3 (20 cores) CPU and 2011-v3 CPU to which has 32 cores also Support SSE 4.1 and 4.2!! when WIN 11 24H2 comes out final released. ATGPUD2003
Actually to be clear: Intel Core based on Nehalem and above - ok with 24H2 Pentium/Celeron/Atom - ok with 24H2 aslong as its Sandy Bridge and above (Since Arrandale and Clarkdale based Pentiums/Celerons doesnt have proper POPCNT support and SSE4.2 support)
Atoms have nothing to do with Core I3/I5/I7 (and some Pentiums and Celerons). They are based on completely different silicon. They support SSE4.2 since the Silvermont micro-architecture released in 2013. (The same is applicable to some other Pentium and Celerons based on the same silicon) Obviously calling Celeron and Pentium completely different CPUs released in the same timeframe isn't helping for clarity (to be polite)
Yeah. Still waiting the NX bit patch to install Win 8.1 on pre 2005 Pentium Ms (and other CPUs of that era). No one is pressuring for a pointless task. And no developer would waste his time just to do a pointless task.
If you are masochist enough to use a stupid pointless and slow OS like win11 24H2 just use a 13 Y/O machine instead of a 14 Y/O one. Or spend your time watching the paint drying (likely a more productive task) Or just use win8x/win10 . Pretty simple.