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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.
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.
Well Linux started supporting the new CPU features six months ago. Probably earlier inside Intel - when you're wanting to test your new CPU features before you release the CPU, you can either wait for Microsoft to use them in Windows, or do it yourself in Linux.
I know that was done with x64, AMD ported Linux's existing 64 bit support, then a few years later Microsoft released 64 bit Windows.
"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.
When I hear or see the word "turbo", my first thought is of this Far Side cartoon.
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