Windows users with older computers may experience problems when installing newer graphics drivers from Nvidia. The issue arises because some older CPUs don’t support a specific instruction set called POPCNT (population count). This can cause systems to crash or freeze during boot-up.
Nvidia recently announced that its driver version 555 and above will no longer work on older CPUs that lack this instruction set. If you try to install these newer drivers on an unsupported CPU, your system may blue screen with a “SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED” error code.
Windows 10 users with older processors but still-supported graphics cards (like GTX 750 Ti or newer) can prevent their systems from automatically downloading driver version 555 or higher by tweaking their Windows Update settings.
While this issue may not affect many users, it’s essential to know that if your system experiences problems after updating the graphics driver, it might be due to the lack of POPCNT support. To check whether your CPU supports POPCNT, refer to Nvidia’s knowledge base article.
Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/nvidia-drivers-confirmed-to-cause-bsod-on-windows-pcs-without-certain-cpu-instructions/