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I was surprised at all the people talking about Windows 26H1 leading up to this post by MS. Before this year, I had never really heard of (or recall, I guess is a better word for it) an H1 release. I always think about H2. So it makes sense to me that 26H1 isn’t for standard x86 PCs.
Initially MS had some plan for 2 releases a year. They were using the release month of April you may recall, so there was a Windows 2004 (i.e. April 2020) but I think they found that confusing and switched to H1 and H2. They did that for like one year before running into a delay that meant there would be no H1, and then they seemed to rationalize away the two a year plan after that, landing only on H2 releases, until this 26H1 thingie.
I am assuming it is for new features explicit for the new Snapdragon X2 processor, such as Bitlocker hardware acceleration, this will start to appear on other processors going forward as well.
There are also rumours of an architecture change in the Kernel and more Rust, maybe the ARM branch is further along and some of those changes are needed for Bitlocker hardware acceleration as well, so the X2 devices gets the update early, everybody else gets it in the Autumn as usual.
It is interesting that there are x64 ISOs for developers, so it sounds like maybe samples of the next generation Intel or AMD processors are also being made available to some developers, who might then need to do re-installs, or for devs looking to get the jump on the forthcoming changes, before they reach general availability for all processors. I would also expect that most devs are still on x64 machines, so they need x64 VMs to test the code to start with, until X2 is generally available.