Microsoft will be cutting support for Intel's 6th generation Core Skylake CPUs for Windows 7/8.1 as of July 2017 and has also announced that upcoming SoCs like Intel Kaby Lake, AMD Bristol Ridge and Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 will also only have Windows 10 OS support.

In a rather surprising move, Microsoft has updated its hardware support policy saying that it will end support for Intel 6th generation Core Skylake CPUs on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 OS as of July 2017.

As this was not enough, Microsoft has also announced that it will focus on deep integration between Windows OS and the silicon, by pushing support for latest SoCs only on its latest Windows 10 OS. To be precise, Windows 10 OS will be the only support Windows platform for Intel's upcoming 14nm Kaby Lake, AMD's 28nm Bristol Ridge APUs as well as Qualcomm's upcoming 14nm MSM8996 SoC, also known as the Snapdragon 820.

According to Microsoft, the decision to drop support for rather new Intel Skylake CPUs comes from a fact that operating systems like Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 were never designed for "the latest and greatest technological advances" we now have on the PC and thus it is the logical move.

Microsoft's Windows 10 OS has much faster adoption compared to the Windows 7 and Windows 8 OS and it has recently been active on 200 million computers, tablets or smartphones. On the other hand, Microsoft Windows 7 still held a majority share with around 56 percent of the market and it will be hard to push users to upgrade to Windows 10 OS.



Source: via Hothardware.com.