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

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.

15 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. FFS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    When the fuck did /. start posting shit that is nothing but some douchenozzle sucking MS's cock!?

  2. and why no one cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    stll not upgradng to it , f U

  3. At least two other OSs will "optimize" Kaby Lake by tyme · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can think of two other operating systems, other than Windows 10, that will "Optimize" Kaby Lake processors, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the student to figure out which ones they are.

    --
    just a ghost in the machine.
  4. So, no difference then? by Z80a · · Score: 2, Insightful

    After all, while Win10 will have those performance improvements, they will most likely be negated by all the spyware bullshit installed by the integrated adware/data mining system.

  5. And Linux, BSD etc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can we phrase this the other way that doesn't make Microsoft look good? Just say Windows 8.1 and older will not get updates for Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Zen.

    We expect most modern OSes to do these kinds of upgrades. Only calling out Windows 10 makes it seem like these are somehow special windows features, when they are nothing of the sort. Linux already has patches available for Intel's Turbo Boost 3.0, and that's just the first example I searched for.

  6. misleading by sittingnut · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Why Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Zen Will Only Be Optimized On Windows 10 "

    that is misleadingly worded.

    correctly speaking m$ will only optimize windows 10 for these processors. they can optimize their older os to these, if they want to, but will not due to costs, etc.
    similarly any other os can optimize for these processors, if they want to. there is no prohibition for doing that.

    why editors at /. want to word this only from m$ pov leading to misleading readings(in at least 2 summaries dealing with this issue) is puzzling.

    1. Re:misleading by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      but will not due to costs, etc.

      It's nothing to do with costs and everything to do with ramming Windows 10 down the throats of Microsoft's users.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  7. O ok by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Windows 10 can go to hell. I'd rather switch to MacOSX or Linux, either way, both -SIGNIFICANTLY- less shit than Windows 10. Fuck that noise

  8. Re:At least two other OSs will "optimize" Kaby Lak by _merlin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Furthermore, Windows 7 or 8 out of the box CANNOT recognize these new chipsets and CANNOT refuse to install because of them.

    This is just plain wrong. You could very easily make an OS that uses a whitelist of CPUID responses and PCI probe responses and refuses to install/boot on anything else. CPUs provide features for detecting/identifying generations, it would be easy enough to abuse this to make an OS refuse to install/boot on a chip that was released after it.

    I'm not saying any mainstream OS does this, just that it's by no means impossible, and pretending that it's impossible just makes you look uninformed/ignorant.

  9. Re: Big huge shrug by Dahamma · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Are you willing to pay for it? Can you convince another million users to do so? if not, why should they add new features to an 8 year old OS? What were you doing 8 years ago and are you willing to stop what you are doing now and spend the next year supporting it for no gain?

  10. Re:Linux supported Kaby Lake features in March by Trogre · · Score: 5, Insightful

    User base.

    Compare the user base of Linux 2.6.x from 2009 as a proportion of all Linux users, to the user base of Windows 7 as a proportion of all Windows users.

    Should I draw you a picture?

    For extra credit, consider the reasons why Linux users have happily moved on from Linux 2.6.x from 2009, but many Windows users are still using Windows 7.

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  11. Re: Linux supported Kaby Lake features in March by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Idiotic fear of change?

    Win 10 is a great step forward. Holdouts are being stupid.

  12. The end of the journey? by jandersen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know, the header is needlessly gloomy, but haven't we, some time ago, reached the point where advances in HW are no longer all that interesting? There were major excitements when we went from 8 to 16 bit, 32 bits 64 bits; and with the introduction of protected memory (which made pre-emptive multitasking workable) and virtualisation. It's been long since I thought a new CPU feature would be worth upgrading for - it would be great to have more cores and RAM, but it can wait. And while quantum computing, graphene and carbon nanotubes are promising technologies that may boost the speed to incredible heights, I probably wouldn't even notice the difference between a response time of a millisecond and a nanosecond. Yeah, some things would be snappier, but as a consumer, it won't matter enough for me to really care.

    The same goes for SW - I haven't seen anything for almost a decade, that I thought I must have. I have all the tools I need and more: editors, compilers, databases engines galore, office packages, several classes of graphics editors (bitmap, vector, ray tracing, ..), I can design fonts that stretch all the way to the far end of Unicode and so on. Of course, because I use Linux, I have all of these things on any HW I am ever likely to encounter (and where they are relevant; I don't at the moment foresee a need for running Oracle or Glassfish on a mobile).

    I guess the big question here is - from a consumer's point of view, have we reached the point where a computer is just a computer; an appliance, like a toaster, where they may look different and you may choose one look over another, but actually they just do the same basic thing?

  13. Re: Linux supported Kaby Lake features in March by stealth_finger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Win 10 is a great step forward.

    Maybe it is when your start menu doesn't randomly decide to take 5 minutes to load.

    --
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  14. Re:At least two other OSs will "optimize" Kaby Lak by MachineShedFred · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I know you're being funny because Apple's current product lineup looks like something unearthed from an ancient Sumerian ziggurat at this point, but I have a feeling they aren't quite done with Mac yet, and their A-series SoCs can't get anywhere close to the performance of even the lowest wattage CPU in Intel's x64 products.

    Apple might be one of the first large OEMs to ship kaby lake - maybe that's why they took a pass on the current chips?

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