Skylake processors will have shorter Win 7 support than older processors - except some

[Karsten75]

Ars Technica published this today: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/

If you own a system with an Intel 6th generation Core processor—more memorably known as Skylake—and run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you'll have to think about upgrading to Windows 10 within the next 18 months. Microsoft announced today that after July 17, 2017, only the "most critical" security fixes will be released for those platforms and those fixes will only be made available if they don't "risk the reliability or compatibility" of Windows 7 and 8.1 on other (non-Skylake) systems.

The full range of compatibility and security fixes will be published for non-Skylake machines for Windows 7 until January 14 2020, and for Windows 8.1 until January 10 2023.

But it gets worse:

Next generation processors, including Intel's "Kaby Lake", Qualcomm's 8996 (branded as Snapdragon 820), and AMD's "Bristol Ridge" APUs (which will use the company's Excavator architecture, not its brand new Zen arch) will only be supported on Windows 10.

Unless you have enough clout with Microsoft, then processor support is different, somehow:

Microsoft provided PC World a short list of approved devices that use Skylake processors that will continue to be supported during the 18 month window when running Windows 7 or 8.1. Those systems are: Dell Latitude 12, Dell Latitude 13 7000 Ultrabook, Dell XPS 13, HP EliteBook Folio, HP EliteBook 1040 G3, Lenovo ThinkPad T460s, Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and Lenovo ThinkPad P70. In conjunction with the system builders, Microsoft will test those systems with Windows 7 and 8.1 to ensure that drivers and operating system fixes work as expected.

 

[GhislainG]

Why would that be an issue? People who buy a new state of the art system usually install the latest OS. Windows 7 was released in 2009 and it will be supported until 2017; that gives everyone time to update to a newer version (hardware and OS).

 

[Supernova1138]

Why would that be an issue? People who buy a new state of the art system usually install the latest OS. Windows 7 was released in 2009 and it will be supported until 2017; that gives everyone time to update to a newer version (hardware and OS).

It's mostly going to be an issue for two groups of people: the tin foil hat brigade who believe that Windows 10 feeds everything they do to the NSA and don't want to upgrade because of that, and business users who don't want to put the time and money into migrating to Windows 10 so soon after being forced to upgrade to Windows 7.

In any case, it seem that you could still use Windows 7 or 8.1 on Skylake or newer, assuming the hardware vendors provide driver support, but Microsoft will not be providing any support for newer features that the new hardware brings on the older OSes, so you'd lose out on some of the more advanced power management features upcoming CPUs might bring to the table or possibly some newer instruction sets.

 

[Karsten75]

Why would that be an issue? People who buy a new state of the art system usually install the latest OS. Windows 7 was released in 2009 and it will be supported until 2017; that gives everyone time to update to a newer version (hardware and OS).

Here's the Anandtech article enumerating issues with this announcement by Microsoft.

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

It's just bizarre and probably a move to improve their revenue model once they move Win 10 to a subscription model in late 2016 or 1H2017. My guess is that the announced date for end of selective Skylake support will coincide with the advent of a subscription model for Win 10.