Microsoft Will Not Support Upcoming Processors Except On Windows 10

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9964/microsoft-to-only-support-new-processors-on-windows-10

We've talked about MS going with a "rolling" service model before on NBR and people didn't believe...

 

Luckily for now it seems to be soft requirements,however when it becomes hard requirements we might need nasty hacks like kernel patches here and there.For now it seems more along the lines of if intel release x instruction set,don't expect us to back-port it and such,like speed shift may or may not work on win7

Unless there happens to be some drastic changes to x86 architecture i don't see us not using older os on new hardware even if it means minor mods,however if the newer versions of windows make some use of some new specific instruction then there might be performance hits depending on said instruction.

Glass half full it's more like hey,don't tell us your windows 7 app doesn't make full use of kaby-lake,although we should have an = right to reply saying well hey,don't make os's past windows 7 suck.

 

This won't happen

MS is saber rattling to force people on to Windows 10.

It's just another ploy to trick people in to upgrading to Windows 10.

No government, military, corporation that has a large investment in hardware and operating systems is going to fragment their infrastructure according to MS's wishes.

Standard OS image(s) had better work on new hardware purchases, or push comes to shove, the hardware will win and the OS will get re-chosen to one that can support images with a long term service life (Linux) - not an OS image that goes obsolete every 3 months timed to new hardware releases.

That kind of support fragmentation costs a lot of money. Professionals aren't going to put up with MS creating a constantly fragmenting target to support by obsoleting OS images everytime new hardware releases.

I have done the opposite for many companies, consolidated OS images - reducing fragmentation, including back porting new drivers - new to old releases - of the OS to create universal images that support legacy hardware - there is a big demand for this because it reduces support costs.

Even in a Cloud based environment, someone ends up holding the Iron.

MS is being silly. Intel is probably saying, "you said what??" right about now

 

@hmscott

Do they even care? As the other company has demonstrated, you can live very well by screwing prosumers (let alone gov/mil) and catering purely towards consumers. If those moves help to milk more from consumers, losing some market share in other sectors is worth it.

 

Win win for Intel, If you currently have windows 7 on ivy,and for some reason you want windows 10,Intel makes nothing out of the upgrade.In a world where windows 10 would need Skylake and above ,If you happen to want windows 10 for whatever reason,now Intel makes money also.Currently those two companies work closely I'm sure it was a joint decision to screw us over

 

So Wintel just got another meaning……

 

MS will wake up from their brilliant idea any day now, and realize this saber cuts both ways.

If not, their bud's at Intel will be giving them a call to have a heart to heart, and stop the insanity

Intel may wait for a little while for the run on Haswell/Broadwell CPU's to clear out channel inventory

 

Just when Microsoft hasn't done something to make me like them less in awhile, they come out and do something like this. It's particularly galling that they're announcing this months after Skylake's release, when there are likely already hundreds of thousands to millions of systems out there with Skylake and Windows 7. Building a Skylake system in 2015, planning to upgrade systems in 2018 or 2019, and consequently choosing Windows 7 over 10 is a perfectly reasonable decision if you aren't a fan of the changes in 8/10... and then Microsoft decides to pull the rug out from under those people.

I'll also repeat a note from near the end of the Anandtech article that's particularly noteworthy:

Indeed, shouldn't be up to Intel or AMD whether their next-gen platforms will have driver support for older versions of Windows? If they think the sales from Windows 7 systems will justify the effort to make compatible drivers, they can make it a supported platform; otherwise they can skip shipping chipset versions for particular versions. Ultimately they (or their motherboard partners) are the ones making the drivers. Perhaps Microsoft is providing some support to help with writing those drivers, and they can withdraw that support... but if Intel can write good drivers for 7 for Skylake or AMD can for Zen without support from Microsoft, I would expect that to be their prerogative.

I'm also curious why this applies to Skylake. It's already out; there are already drivers out their for it and systems running the to-be-unsupported version. What does Intel have to gain by renouncing support on Skylake? They're already written the drivers, and everyone knows that Speed Shift won't be supported on 7, but the performance will be equal to or better than Haswell/Broadwell without that anyway. If it were starting with Kaby Lake, then Intel could be announcing ahead of time that they don't plan to write platform drivers for that version, but that argument doesn't work for Skylake where it's already done. True, it could clear out Haswell/Broadwell inventory a bit, but it doesn't seem like that short-term benefit would be worth the negative PR from everyone who's already bought Skylake and wants to stick with 7/8.

Strange news, and certainly doesn't make me either want to switch to 10, or upgrade from Sandy Bridge.

 

Not only that, as we speak all of the major OEMs are selling Skylake machines for the professional market, and each and every one of those is being sold with Windows 7 as the default OS (of course). There's no way Microsoft can now pull out the rug from underneath these systems. Note that, if you read closely enough, Microsoft also will provide a list of Skylake systems that they will continue to support. My guess is that each and every one of the systems that are being sold now, and were on the market before the announcement from Microsoft, have to be on that list.

Now, as far as future systems are concerned, yes, in my opinion they'll find out soon enough that they can't do this. Just look at what happened with XP, when they had to walk back their bold announcements several times until they were finally able to kill off support for it. With Windows 7, given the universal skepticism and bad press towards Windows 10 in the professional community, this will only be so much harder. If anything, right now my money would be on Microsoft ending up extending support for Windows 7 beyond 2020.

Bottom line: Saber-rattling and empty threats.

 

I have 2 big questions after reading through the Anandtech article:

1. Are Intel and AMD actually going along with this?
2. How exactly is Microsoft going to block new CPUs from running on older versions of Windows?

 

As for #2, why do you interpret "will not support" as "will actively block"?

Unsupported in the software world often means "try it out - it might work, but if you run into issues, don't expect any help from us".


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

They just don't program support for it. It may or may not work.

Chances are the basic functions will work just fine.

 

Since at least the release of Windows 7, has Microsoft ever had to program support for any CPU other than Bulldozer?

This just seems like such an incredibly weird claim that interpreting it in any way other than "won't support = actively block" would make it almost completely irrelevant, as out of the hundreds of CPUs that Intel/AMD have released since 2009, only 1 (to my knowledge) has required active MS support to work properly. And as has already been mentioned, new CPU features like Speed Shift and Connected Standby have never been backported to old OSes, so it's not like there's any change in policy there either.

 

Microsoft is putting the burden of processor support on the manufacturers now - if there is a bug in the kernel then the manufacturer will have to work around it themselves. The manufacturer will be responsible for ensuring support with the OS. Microsoft wants to be free of its legacy OSes entirely so that they can focus all development on Windows 10.

 

Whats odd is M$ saying this everyone knows already that AMD and Intel drop support for there processors and graphics after so many years to try and get people to buy there new hardware. Now M$ has gotten into this to get peeps in the the new Ose's so they can try and sell them something thru M$ store.

 

I hope this encourages game developers and other software writers to start focusing on Linux support.

Make Linux the gamer's choice OS. Free, easier/faster to use, totally in the user's control, and not reminded every few minutes of every day that your butt belongs to M$.

Would be the best breath of fresh air in a long to time boycott M$/Valve types.

 

Again, unsupported does not equal incompatible.

 

SteamOS honestly has the best chance of getting people to migrate over to Linux at this point. Its very user friendly compared to distributions (even though it has a full desktop mode that you can access pretty easily).

No but it definitely can mean lack of support for features of the processor, some of which people might really desire. Kaby Lake is supposed to come with some pretty crazy optimizations.

Microsoft is pretty clear about their intent here.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windows-10-embracing-silicon-innovation/

Also, Microsoft is only supporting specific machines until July of 2017... Support for other Skylake machines is not guaranteed by Microsoft or the OEMs.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/skylake-support

 

" Compared to Windows 7 PC’s, Skylake when combined with Windows 10, enables up to 30x better graphics and 3x the battery life – with the unmatched security ofCredential Guard utilizing silicon supported virtualization."

Haha. Wut? How can Windows 10 enable up to 30x "better graphics" whatever that term means.

 

I have been thinking of OS choices for myself in the future, since Windows 7 is the last best OS from Microsoft. There was a time that I could not wait to migrate to their next gen OS. Now I cringe at the thought of having to upgrade to anything! For that reason, I will not be upgrading to anything Microsoft currently has to offer. Windows 10 is absolutely horrible! Control panel/pc settings? Stupid to have both. Cortana? Really? Horrible looking UI, and a lack of "feeling in control" of my OS leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. I feel they have been "dumbing" down Windows since 7.

 

Steam is the DRM Nazi of the world; they're as bad or worse than M$. I'll never forgive them for what they did to gaming with "online authentication", and I'll never buy any game that requres such a thing.

Linux is about as free (not money) as you can get without manufacturing/writing your own hardware/software. If game-developers would just start not hating their costumers and sell games -instead of all this DRM/forced-community/"citizen, pick up that can" crap- I think that would be great.

 

I do not really care about the DRM part. I was simply stating a fact. If SteamOS takes off, Linux adoption will soar. Otherwise it will continue to be stagnant as it has for years and years. Most gamers use Steam. DRM? Definitely. But out of every DRM solution in history, it is by far the most flexible and its actually convenient.

 

Steam just needs to vastly revamp and improve their customer service. I have rarely ever had an issue, but when you do, trying to talk to someone other than an auto-reply robot is agonizing. And you really don't get any recourse or resolution of "gray area" issues (like purchasing from a reputable third party reseller). That being said, Steam does offer value for their service despite the DRM. It's the whole "make lemons into lemonade" scenario and could be a lot worse. But SteamOS is the best chance for Linux to gain a large gaming user base and I'd like to see it too.

 

I've been fortunate enough to never have an issue with Steam. That's more than I can say for uPlay, Origin, etc...

 

Fortunately I've never had an issue with uPlay or Origin. I'm sure theirs is just as atrocious.

 

I had a problem with one of the Crysis game bundle items, and I got the run around too. I had to finally dig through many years of posts online to find the fix.

Months later, I reinstalled games because I switched SSD's, and lo and behold, Origin installed all the Crysis bundle games perfectly - they had fixed the problem in their installer but didn't contact me to let me know it was fixed...

So, I guess that's a good response?

This is all on Windows 8.1.

 

I've heard Origin has a decent refund policy. That alone would already make it better than Steam in terms of customer service.

 

Yeah, the buy-a-key-on-a-third-party-reseller support is nonexistant. I had an issue with a Steam key I bought on Green Man Gaming once; GMG said talk to Steam; Steam said talk to GMG. Totally useless. Which is a problem for the third-party sellers selling Steam keys... after that I haven't bought on GMG again, since I know that if I did run into unexpected issues, I'd have no recourse.

Steam did change their refund policy last summer. It used to be pretty much luck of the draw; now there's an actual process. I think it's something like within 24 hours of first playing and within 7 days of purchasing (don't quote me on that though). Of course that is for first-party sales.

I think you're right about Origin; IIRC Origin's policy may have inspired Steam's change. Not really familiar with Origin myself though; I haven't bought an EA game since BFBC2, which I never did get to work in multiplayer.

Back on the main topic, I'll wait for AMD/Intel to announce driver support for OS versions. I don't plan to upgrade CPUs until at least Zen anyway.

 

The other important parameter is gaming time is less than 2 hours to qualify for a return refund.

 

Ah, well, that kind of makes sense. That's enough time to spot a lot of critical issues (game won't launch, severe graphical issues, no multiplayer, etc.) without being enough to finish too many games. Seems like a reasonable place to draw the line, assuming the refund is primarily intended for technical issues and not it just not being fun.

Granted, I can commiserate with wanting to return a game for it not being fun, too. But while I do think more games having demos would be good, I think that's also something that should more or less be left up to the developer. If the developer wants to provide a demo or a free weekend, they can choose to do so; if Steam allowed 24 hour returns with 23 hours of playtime, it would essentially amount to a free day for anyone, even if they loved the game, and I don't think that would be fair to the developers, particularly developers of games that are shorter by design.

 

That's what I think too, 24 hours to return, up to 24 hours game play. Steam has free game weekends to try games, and that's no different, except some are 48-72 hours free play long

 

To clarify: I think the 2 hours of playtime is fair; the 24 hours I was thinking was within first playing it. I think it should be up to the developer to allow more than 2 hours of free playtime (such as the 48-72 hour free weekend); for games with longer playtime like Civilization or Tropico it may well make sense, but for shorter games it may not. 24 hours to return on a game that only lasts 4 hours to begin with wouldn't be fair.

 

I think that goes without saying

Clearly the game developer/publisher is going to set the limit. Steam came up with what they think is a fair return time of 2 hours that works for most / all games.

Steam has game play weekends for 1-3 days of free play on a game to try it out. Steam worked with the developer/publisher to agree to this in advance.

Maybe the game can be completed in 4 hours, but online game play - which is the primary value - is endless. The 4 hours of single player are likely for training time to get to know the game before going online.

In that case 24 hours is still ok

 

But that assumes that the game has a multiplayer component. For games like Gunpoint, Papers Please, or Goat Simulator, it's a single player game and you can see a fair amount of it in a few hours (and play through several times in 24 hours if that's most of what you do in a day). And sure, these games couldn't really justify a $60 price tag, nor do they charge that. But there are plenty of good single-player-only games as well, including some good but shorter ones.

At any rate this is getting too far off topic, so that'll be my last post in this thread (unless there are subsequent on-topic posts to reply to).

 

What it sounds like we agree to then is that the return play time limit should be dependent on the game, and agreed to by the developer/publisher, and that should be clearly stated at the time of purchase - and hopefully also clearly labeled in the game info.

You be sure and update Steam on their new game play return time limit Policy