August 11, 2016 9:53 am -- Updates to Silicon Support Policy for Windows -- By Shad Larsen / Director of Windows Business Planning
As previously communicated earlier this year, future silicon platforms including Intel’s upcoming 7th Gen Intel Core (Kaby Lake) processor family and AMD’s 7th generation processors (e.g. Bristol Ridge) will only be supported on Windows 10, and all future silicon releases will require the latest release of Windows 10.Has this been recinded?
Where's the announcement from Intel or AMD? You won't find one. Intel and AMD are chipmakers. They don't give a damn about the endpoints. They provide instruction sets for their UEFI and BIOS chipsets, code drivers for various platforms, and dole out the hardware. What Apple or Microsoft or Linux-du-jour do with the hardware is on them.
My point here is that Microsoft is only providing support for those platforms on Windows 10. Meaning if you install Windows 7 or Windows 8 on a Kaby Lake-based system and something goes wrong, don't expect them to help you if you call or contact them on their support forums. It just won't happen. That will be the very first thing they ask.
If anything, this is more burdensome for the business than the home user. If businesses aren't ready to go to Windows 10, like my company, but Dell or HP or Lenovo are putting out Kaby Lake or Bristol Ridge machines, now there's a support issue if that desktop support group has a platform issue across all of their machines. The home user is going to search across Google or Bing for questions regarding issue X with Windows 7 on a Kaby Lake platform, and people are going to thoroughly insulate themselves by stating from the outset that Microsoft doesn't support Windows 7 on Kaby Lake, but the community of users is such that SOMEONE will find a hack around one of the blockades that Microsoft might put in place.
And that's another thing. Think back to Windows 98 or Windows XP. There's nothing stopping any of you from installing Windows XP on a Skylake-based system. There's nothing in the firmware of the chip that would prevent you from doing so. Now, the system might not function very well. You'll have an exceptionally difficult time finding drivers for XP, but that doesn't preclude you from doing it. Furthermore, you ever try to install Windows 98 in a VM? VMware, Hyper-V, or even VirtualBox, you can do it. Windows 98 WILL run in a virtual environment. Try to install the integration tools and watch everything go down in a flaming pile of shit, but it'll install and run. Try to feed it a 1 GBps NIC, and it'll likely puke, but you installed it.
The point I'm making here is that Microsoft is not coming out and saying that you can not, no way, no how install and/or use Windows 7 or Windows 8 on a newer architecture. They can't say that, because they don't have a say. What they DO have a say in is the software support of those platforms. If there are advanced instruction sets in those chipsets, Microsoft is only going to code Windows 10 to take advantage of those instruction sets. THAT is what they're saying.
The doom and gloom bullshit I read on this forum when it comes to Microsoft is mind-numbing and downright absurd. Microsoft is the company that everyone wants to hate. Hell, half of you still curse Bill Gates' name, and the man hasn't been involved with Microsoft since 2014! Read between the lines on this tech stuff.
Years ago I used to hate Microsoft, use the silly little dollar sign when I wrote Micro$oft. So cute. As I've grown to know the people there and learned the platform and gone through the certification tracks, Microsoft is no different than any other software developer, they're just bigger and when they make even a minor change in how they do business, everyone turns into a headcase.
This article is FUD. Period. Microsoft is simply stating that they will not SUPPORT newer architectures on older Windows operating systems. Doesn't mean you can't upgrade. It means that if something doesn't work, they warned you. Caveat emptor.