Earlier this week, some people waiting to take the bar exam received a message from ExamSoft, the company that makes the Examplify software that is used in many states to administer the exam: PCs with the latest 12th generation Intel Core processors “do not currently are supported”because they “triggered an automatic check of the Examplify virtual machine”. The solution the company came up with was for people to find a different device to take the test, which is a frustrating and useless “workaround”for those with a brand new computer.
As The Verge points out, Examsoft’s system requirements page does not provide any further details for its software, merely reiterating that 12th generation processors are not currently supported and that you are not allowed to run the Examplify software in a virtual machine. But this isn’t the first time this has happened, and the culprit is almost certainly the hybrid CPU architecture that Intel uses in most of its 12th generation chips.
In previous generations, all the cores in a given Intel CPU were identical to each other: the same design, the same performance, the same feature set. Clock speed and power consumption would go up and down depending on what the computer was doing at any given time, but the cores themselves were the same and could be handled by the operating system that way. In 12th generation chips, processors come with a set of completely different processor cores: large high-performance cores (or P-cores) handle heavy tasks, while smaller low-power cores (or E-cores) handle lighter tasks. But since operating systems and most applications tend to assume that all CPU cores in a given system are the same, software needs to be modified,
Apps that haven’t been updated sometimes see two different types of CPU cores available to them and assume they’re actually seeing two completely different PCs. This was the reason why some video game DRM and anti-cheat software packages needed updates or workarounds to work on 12th generation processors. At the time, Intel stated that the affected software detects the E-cores “as a different system”, which could also explain why the Examplify software thinks it’s running in a virtual machine – it sees that there is an abstraction layer between it and the CPU. and it refuses to start.
This also means that there is a potential workaround that could make 12th generation laptops compatible with the Examplify software in the short term: disable E-cores. Not all PCs support this, but most custom desktop boards allow this, sometimes by manually adjusting the number of cores, and sometimes by enabling “Legacy Game Compatibility Mode”.
This option is less common in laptops, but at least some of the 12th gen laptops we tested also have a toggle for it in the BIOS, usually somewhere in the performance or power settings – we’ve included screenshots of the Dell XPS 15 BIOS that allows users to configure the number of E cores, and the BIOS of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon does not allow this. There is no guarantee that disabling the E-core will fix the problem, but it works for those older games and there’s a good chance it will work for the Examplify software as well (if you can do it in the first place).
The switch to a hybrid architecture has caused other issues besides problems with Examplify and older games. Windows 10 and earlier versions of the Linux kernel cannot take full advantage of 12th generation processors because they do not support Intel’s “Thread Director”technology to ensure that tasks are sent to CPU cores that can process them. best by getting people with 12th gen PCs to use Windows 11 to get the best possible performance and battery life. Disabling the E-cores was also the only way for some users to take advantage of the Intel AVX-512 instructions.with Alder Lake processors. Since P cores support AVX-512 and E cores do not, AVX-512 support is usually disabled for all cores by default, but some motherboards allow AVX-512 to be enabled again after E cores are disabled.