Slashdot Mirror
New Intel and AMD Chips Will Only Support Windows 10 (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Buried in the announcement of the new Kaby Lake (seventh-generation) processors and a rash of incoming notebooks set to use them is the confirmation that they will have a Windows 10 future. Microsoft has been warning people for ages that Kaby Lake will not run on anything older than Windows 10, and it looks like AMD's upcoming Zen chip will be going the same way. Microsoft said, "As new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support. This enables us to focus on deep integration between Windows and the silicon, while maintaining maximum reliability and compatibility with previous generations of platform and silicon." "We are committed to working with Microsoft and our ecosystem partners to help ensure a smooth transition given these changes to Microsoft's Windows support policy," an Intel spokesperson said. "No, Intel will not be updating Win 7/8 drivers for 7th Gen Intel Core [Kaby Lake] per Microsoft's support policy change." An AMD representative was equally neutral. "AMD's processor roadmap is fully aligned with Microsoft's software strategy," AMD chief technical officer Mark Papermaster said, via a company spokeswoman. Slashdot reader MojoKid via HotHardware has some more details on Intel's Kaby Lake 7th Gen Core Series Processors for those yearning to learn more.
Hello Linux
Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot, and it will bleed out.
ok.. so... im fine in principle if intel and microsoft aren't interested in porting chipset drivers backwards for old windows versions.
I presume that this isn't creating windows 10 lock in though; and that linux / bsd / etc will be fully supported?? Or am I mistaken?
And also, is if things are that different, does it mean only a next-generation kernel version will run on them?
I'm also curious about virtualization? Can old windows versions run in virtualization on these new chips?
I wonder if they are tracking this. I think they need to be reminded of this - all three of them.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"Windows 10 will be the only Microsoft OS to support new Intel and AMD chips"
Little to see here, moving on.
It will be illegal to run any other version than Windows 10.
I know they never update their hardware anymore, but will they adjust OSX to the processors as well, or what? This is interesting and, while promising for efficiency, bothersome in several ways.
Wine is often sufficient.
If it weren't for dirty tricks like this, users would treat Windows 7 like XP... M$ would need to pry it from their cold, dead hands.
It doesn't matter. I would imagine 95% of all Windows licenses are sold with hardware, anyway. We are going to keep buying refurb machines with Windows 7 licenses, because that's the OS we need. The hardware really hasn't mattered for workstations for a decade or so, anyway.
I don't respond to AC's.
Soon all our machines will be totally infected with spyware sponsored by our own tax dollars.
Their notebooks are DOOMED.
Vigorously.
Looks like Papermaster just threw away a lot of potential future paper (excepting possibly legal as this looks like collusion) with that statement.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
... since after all, there are much better, free operating systems out there that run well on both old and new CPUs.
Wow, Microsoft must be paying a fuckton of money to AMD. Windows 7 is still 47% (down only about 5% from Q1 2016 and probably not moving any farther now that free upgrades are over). If my competitor stood up and said "we are walking away from half of the market" my response would be "We are committed to supporting the half of the market our competitor just abandoned."
Is AMD independently wealthy enough to also ignore half of the market, or is Microsoft making them wealthy enough to do so? Stockholders ought to be asking that question right now, especially given the weak position that AMD is in.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Hello Linux
Goodbye Windows. Hello Linux
Why? This affects no existing hardware. Its just that future hardware will not support Windows 7 and 8.
And frankly this is pretty much what happens under Android too, a chip vendor developing some new chip's drivers only for the current Android version. Will that make Android/Linux fans flock to iOS when they learn their Samsung Galaxy S8 can not run Android 4.4?
I expect UEFI lock down will soon prevent Linux from being installed.
Linux is already supported by UEFI. The major Linux distros have paid the one-time US$99 fee to be able to get their code on the UEFI supported list.
The headline is crystal clear. Linux, Mac, Win 7-- fuggedaboudit.
Or is this another Slashdot clickbait? Ah, they are off the hook because they copied the clickbait at PCWorld. At least PCWorld had the decency to add this statement "But a change in Microsoftâ(TM)s support policy means that it will be only be officially supported by Windows 10." which seems to soften the misleading headline.
As most here agree, ways will be found to deploy these chips in a useful direction despite the monopolistic desires of Microsoft.
...omphaloskepsis often...
How do you test the chips then? If it crashes, you don't know if it's the chip or Windows 10 because Windows 10 is (currently) crashy.
I suppose you could compare with Windows 10 on an older chip, but timing difference could make them out of sync such that screen-grabbing auto-tests may often fail. For example, you launch app A and then app B. App A may open before App B on chip X but the reverse for chip Y. The relative computing time for a given sequence of instructions is likely to be different between generations of chips.
Table-ized A.I.
Lots of motherboard manufacturers still run diagnostics on DOS. I don't think very many of them have moved their diags over to run as UEFI applications.
I could imagine (and the article implies this) that older versions of Windows won't work on the newer CPUs, as disappointing as that is, I suppose that makes some sense.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... you want new hardware you need a new OS ...
By the time the hardware arrives Windows 10 won't be new, it will merely be the current OS.
And its not exactly a new thing. I recently built a new PC based on a recently released ASUS motherboard. ASUS only provided chipset drivers for Windows 8 and 10. Not sure if 7 would work. Doubtful Vista and older would work correctly.
Not even "old." Just current. CPUs aren't advancing at a breakneck pace or anything. A modern Skylake processor will last the better part of a decade for most purposes, and by then, Intel should have come to their senses, or a competitor will step in.
Also, this should only affect the consumer line (Core i). I can't imagine them locking Xeon processors into Windows 10, so just get yourself the equivalent Xeon (e.g. Xeon E3-1230v5 vs Core i7 6700). You lose the integrated graphics, but that's easy to work around, and it's usually cheaper anyway.
This signature is false.
Intel and AMD are so committed to a good and trustworthy experience for their customers that they are only accommodating installation of the perpetual beta, that data mining sensation, Windows 10? This constitutes a big bet that nearly all of their customers are completely ignorant or utter fools, with the remainder being an insignificant minority that can safely be ignored.
After 20 years of Windows, I'm finally in the process of switching to Linux. I can clearly tolerate a somewhat rubbish OS for a long time but when it's essentially a sinister joke and a toy rather than a serious tool, even a procrastinator like me is motivated to make a change. Of course much of the Win 10 evil has been back ported to Win 7 and 8 but could in theory be avoided. After a while though, one tires of the cat and mouse game of choosing which updates to avoid and now how to get around the update rollups. This business with chip support is just the most recent slap in the face from an increasingly cynical and adversarial Microsoft who is apparently the driving force in this present fiasco.
KDE Neon, for example, is way faster on an old laptop than Windows on a recent Xeon workstation, so this no painful switch. Thus ends the promise of Longhorn, at least for me.
When dealing with Some aspects of the m$ ecosystem, wine is completely inadequate; start with a good single malt Scotch and work from there...
If this is something that would be, say, an antitrust violation, it really doesn't matter unless the government functionaries are willing to take them to court.
Well, that has happened before.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If you don't limit yourself to stupid brain-dead pared-down models of Xeon, you don't sacrifice the integrated graphics. Those that end in 0 are crap. Those that end in 5 or 8 are good. The e3-1225v5 is cheaper than the e3-1230v5 and has graphics. A much, much better deal. There isn't any 1235 (yet), but there is a 1245 and a 1275.
Summary says, "Kaby Lake will not run on anything older than Windows 10".
In the past, operating systems ran on CPUs, not the other way around. So this is truly revolutionary!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Right. It's high school debating tactics and not a reasoned analysis when you simply ignore or gloss over any inconvenient truths and push your conclusion or more precisely, belief or claim, with everything you've got. So tiresome. If anyone can be bothered to refute any of your claims point by point, I'll leave it to them.
The hardware is mature enough and ram is cheap. With PCI passthrough and modern video cards I can afford a 2% frame loss for games since that is all I use windows for. It also makes reboots cheap and easy while browsing the web on another VM. Furthermore it provides a sandbox for security risky applications like web browsers where it can be setup temp/read only and resets at boot. It makes it easy for me to migrate the windows installations so they are no longer locked down to a single machine. So I can setup games once for it's intended windows version and then forget about it. It also empowers easy incremental backups.
Only problematic thing is the cracks I still need to use for games I purchased. I'm one of the few holdouts from steam. I'm old school and like boxes and actually installation media when it's available. But with game VM's being sandboxed it's not so bad. When games get released without copy protection I ultimately buy those versions of the CD or the GOG download. Only thing I use steam for is online games since those games will all go EOL and disappear in 10 years anyways; which is why I incidentally try to stay away from most of them.
Just add these to the growing list of hardware that is Linux only.
It's usually older gear such as PCI cards or scanners that makes the list, so it's nice to have some newer CPUs on our side too.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Which spun up a shitstorm that died down, then TPM modules were introduced and today both Microsoft and Google, and in parallel Arm manufacturers use the technology to restrict what the 'consumers' (since they may physically own it, but don't digitally own it) can install, modify, and run on their PCs and/or ARM based computers, whether single board computer (SBC), tablet, tv box, or cellular phone. And they just keep lapping it up, while those of us concerned about these ownership and privacy issues are too impotent to get ACTUAL open source, user accessable, securable, and modifiable processors and systems designed, funding, and produced. The failure isn't with the consumers enslaving themselves to this liberty failing technology, but rather to us the tech, security, and privacy nerds/hackers/engineers/programmers/professionals for not retaking control of our own systems by building actual hardware and systems outside the control of thse companies, and by extension the societies, governments, and 'leadership' types who benefit from the slow boiling of the waters of privacy and self control.
Ponder on what I have said and see what YOU can do to start making a difference. You might not be able to save the masses, but if you save your fellow nerds the opportunities for the future won't cease.
We're talking drivers here. Things like power management and hardware accelerated media playback.
If these things require APIs that only exist in Windows 10, Intel can't code around them.
So assuming the computer did actually boot in windows 7, graphics might display in compatibility mode and your laptop might only get 3 hours battery life instead of 7.
On the flip side, 'legacy' drivers for Windows 7 won't take advantage of innovations in Windows 10.
Making a new chip incompatible with older operating systems is stupid. And what about alternatives to Windows? Apple relies on Intel for CPUs for their computer line.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Skin crawling.
That's not a great example, seeing as how Microsoft ultimately won that battle.
"Won?" Well, that's debatable. After all the appeals, neither side got exactly what it wanted, but I'll grant you that MS ultimately got the better side of the deal: no split into two companies, but it did release details of their API, and showed more glasnost than they had previously.
The point is that the Department of Justice showed that it had the cojones to go after Microsoft, and that made MS proceed more cautiously thereafter.
Today you can never be sure which way it is.
I just wait for someone to figure out how to adapt a Windows 10 driver to Windows 7.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If I really need a Windows environment, I'll spin one up in VMWare. It works just fine there and it's not like I'm gaming on it.
Fuck Microsoft and their attempt to force upgrades by removing choice from the owner of the computer.
And damn Intel and AMD for slobbing the Redmond knob and helping them!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It comes off as *only* Windows 10. That's borderline Huffpo click bait as of course x86 Linux users don't have to lose a moment's sleep over this distressing headline. :-)
I think you have it the wrong way round. When dealing with some aspects of the Micros~1 ecosystem, wine is completely inadequate; start with special brew.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Orwell was a committed socialist - it was a warning against totalitarianism and Soviet style communism.
This is an incredibly shrewd move by Microsoft.
All the millions of copies of pre-W10 Windows still in use are essentially "dead" to Microsoft: they are in fact an overhead, since MS have to continue to host all the patches and update materials for these releases, but can't generate revenue from them once the product is sold and installed. However, from a Microsoft perspective, W10 is the product that keeps on giving. It's incredibly intrusive SpyWareOS(TM) capabilities mean that the moment you have installed it, you become a Microsoft Product again. At any point in time they can send an update to your machine [because you can't turn off auto-update] that reverses any privacy settings you have made. They're not obliged to tell you that they have done it.
In other Words, this move will prevent people from moving their personally-owned Windows 7/8/8.1 Licenses to newer hardware in the event of a hardware failure, so that, over time, those people will be forced to upgrade to SpyWareOS and become part of the Microsoft Product.
Microsoft's defence against any potential future investigations by Monopoly/Market Abuse investigators will be: "It is unreasonable to expect us to continue to offer support for legacy software forever Additionally, we have not only made upgrading to Windows 10 incredibly simple, but we have actually made it free for all existing users for a considerable period of time. Lastly, anyone not happy can go buy a Mac..." And certainly, in most of the world, that will be enough.
What this does is force anyone happy enough to run older Windows versions to upgrade, whether they like it or not. Or migrate. One thing that wasn't completely clear from either this post or the linked articles though: will the new CPU actually prevent say W7 from running at all? Will it's ID string be so alien that older versions of Windows simply won't recognise it and refuse to install? HP tried something like this by putting tiny ICs into their original toner cartridges, such that 3rd party cartridges would not work in their printers. That got overturned in court, though, because it was shown that the IC served no purpose other than to act as a barrier to entry. Could this be shown in a similar light? i.e. Could it be argued that some sneaky microcode work-around serves no purpose other than to enforce the hegemony?
Anyone fluent in legalese lurking today?