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Why Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Zen Will Only Be Optimized On Windows 10 (hothardware.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the does-it-blend dept.

MojoKid writes: There was quite a stir caused recently when it was determined that Microsoft would only be fully supporting Intel's Kaby Lake and AMD's Zen next-generation processor microarchitectures with Windows 10. It's easy to dismiss the decision as pure marketing move, but there's more to consider and a distinction to be made between support and compatibility. The decision means future updates and optimizations that take advantage of the latest architectural enhancements in these new processors won't be made for older OS versions. Both of these microarchitectures have new features that require significant updates to Windows 10 to optimally function. Kaby Lake has updates to Intel's Speed Shift technology that make it possible to change power states more quickly than Skylake, for example. Then there's Intel's Turbo Boost 3.0, which is only baked natively into Windows 10 Redstone 1. For an operating system to optimally support AMD's Zen-based processors, major updates are likely necessary as well. Zen has fine-grained clock gating with multi-level regions throughout the chip, in addition to newer Simultaneous Multi-Threading technology for AMD chips. To properly leverage the tech in Zen, Microsoft will likely have to make updates to the Windows kernel and system scheduler, which is more involved than a driver update. Of course, older versions of Windows and alternative operating systems will still install and run on Kaby Lake and Zen. They are x86 processors, after all.

2 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Linux supported Kaby Lake features in March by WarJolt · · Score: 3, Informative

    Skylake graphics is an issue. I had to use a 4.6 kernel on Ubuntu 16.04. The 4.4 kernel which ships with 16.04 had issues on my notebook. Good news is I can switch between integrated graphics and nvidia now.

  2. Not the first time by dbIII · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not the first time - Microsoft only fully supported the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and descendants on their server line of software.
    Windows XP was stuck on 4GB even when the hardware could support more in MS Server 2003, linux and all the rest.
    Annoying as fuck, a step backwards and one reason a Win2k machine in my workplace (two sockets and 6GB) was kept on Win2k for well over a decade.


    For those without a clue who want to challenge this, at least look up PAE so you don't look so stupid when you do so.