Microsoft has made good on its plans to stop all support for Ryzen and Kaby Lake owners running any OS but Windows 10. Going forward, using one of these chips in Windows 7 or 8.1 will prevent you from downloading any security or software updates in Windows Update.
Last month, we covered news that Microsoft had introduced a KB update that would break Windows Update when running on Kaby Lake or Ryzen hardware from AMD. What was less clear is when the company would actually switch that capability on. Now we know — they did it yesterday.
Ars Technica reports that as of now, Microsoft detects Ryzen or Kaby Lake CPUs running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and returns the following message:
Microsoft’s philosophy is that because Kaby Lake and Ryzen contain low-level improvements unsupported on previous operating systems, as well as peripherals that didn’t exist when Windows 7 was created, it makes sense to push people towards the latest version of the operating system. To a certain extent, I agree with this. We’ve already seen how AMD’s Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 systems can have trouble under Windows 10, because W10 doesn’t natively understand the SenseMI technology that AMD’s newest processors use to adjust their own clock speeds under load. Drivers and UEFI updates are on the way to improve power management, but it can be difficult to shoehorn these capabilities into older operating systems that may not offer the same degree of fine-grained control.
This isn’t even the first time we’ve seen a Microsoft OS fail to run on modern hardware because modern chips are faster than the OS expects, or have capabilities the OS doesn’t know how to drive. That said, there are two things that set this situation apart from any other. First, Microsoft is deliberately killing Windows compatibility by enforcing a software lockout, as opposed to an old OS simply not working properly on new hardware because it was never updated to do so. Second, instead of throwing the problem off on hardware OEMs and driver authors to fix (for example, leaving it up to a hardware vendor to decide whether to support USB 3.0 in Windows 7, or to build NVMe drivers for that operating system), MS is short-circuiting support altogether.
Any company that builds software eventually has to decide when it makes sense to stop supporting certain versions. This isn’t unique to Windows — Apple, Linux distros, and Android all contain their own methods of dealing with support, typically by only offering it for a limited time.
