Hardware & Technical Intel Kaby Lake / AMD RyZen Compatibility

[shadragon]

There are a lot of folks saying "Kaby Lake / RyZen will work fine on Windows X and you don't need to upgrade to Windows 10."

Both chip manufacturers will only support Windows 10. You may be able to run previous version of the OS on those chips, btu they will not be supported and long-term be dangerous as there will no longer be any patches for them.

Here's a quote from an article:

But perhaps the most controversial feature of these chips is one we mentioned at the start of this article: namely that previous versions of Windows will not be supported on this chipset. No matter whether you’re a home-builder or an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), you’ll have to use Windows 10, otherwise you won’t receive security updates or patches.


This will undoubtedly earn the ire of users, but there’s a really good reason for it. In an official blogpost called “Windows 10 Embracing Silicon Innovation”, they attributed this to the immense difficulty in ensuring older versions of Windows are able to use the features of these chips:

“Windows 7 was designed nearly 10 years ago before any x86/x64 SOCs existed. For Windows 7 to run on any modern silicon, device drivers and firmware need to emulate Windows 7’s expectations for interrupt processing, bus support, and power states, which is challenging for WiFi, graphics, security, and more. As partners make customizations to legacy device drivers, services, and firmware settings, customers are likely to see regressions with Windows 7 ongoing servicing.”Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/windows-7-wont-work-intels-current-next-gen-cpus/

No "Support" for a chip does not automatically mean it will stop working on older OS's, but you could encounter bugs or strange behaviours that will not be fixed. PC World article here:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3112...e-zen-chips-will-support-only-windows-10.html

Get informed, read as much as you can and be prepared for the long haul on this subject.

 

[Morbad]

A short time ago I had a Kaby Lake laptop which I installed Windows 7 on.

I had no issues with CPU functionality itself, but as this was a U series SoC with an integrated chipset and no graphics other than the IGP, neither of these had Windows 7 drivers.

Getting Windows 7 installed was the first challenge as the chipset only has an XHCI USB controller and there was no optical drive. Windows 7 has no native XHCI driver, so using a USB stick or USB optical drive was not possible. I ended up getting around this by pulling the SSD, partitioning it and formatting a second partition as bootable, then copying the Windows 7 install files to this secondary partition. This allowed me to boot from the SSD and install Windows 7 on to the main partition of the same drive.

Afterwards, Windows started up fine and most things worked. I was able to activate the OS without issue. I was able to get some of the chipset functionality restored by force installing Windows 7 or Server 2008 drivers from similar hardware over some of the devices, but I had no luck with others. Most notably, I could not get drivers installed for the IGP, which was pretty much a deal breaker.

I was still able to do some hardware testing on the CPU, to get a feel for the IPC (identical to Skylake) and power, well before the desktop Kaby Lake parts launched:

Spoiler

Anyway, I ended up returning the laptop, for entirely unrelated issues.

I have since upgraded a few LGA-1151 Windows 7 systems to 7700K's from 6000 series parts without moving to Windows 10. Because these systems were using the Z170 chipset, which does have Windows 7 drivers, things have gone much more smoothly. IGP still won't work on Windows 7, which removes things like QuickSync, but other than that, the CPUs generally work normally.

RyZen is more worrying. Since it's a new socket (AM4) and all new chipsets, I highly doubt there will be any real Windows 7 support at all, and these systems will likely be barely functional on older versions of Windows.

 

[shadragon]

RyZen is more worrying. Since it's a new socket (AM4) and all new chipsets, I highly doubt there will be any real Windows 7 support at all, and these systems will likely be barely functional on older versions of Windows.

Agreed, and this is the main reason why I'm looking at going to Linux on my new RyZen rig with a VM for my current Win 7 set-up. The additional overhead given by RyZen should more than negate any virtualization losses and I should end up being able to have a faster Win 7 on a more stable OS.