The recent report that Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Zen CPU architectures will actually only be supported on Windows 10 raised a lot of questions and now it appears that we might have a possible reason for it.

According to a report from Hothardware.com, the new simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) and power management features are to blame as these won't be supported on older operating systems.

Intel Kaby Lake architecture will bring a new power-management feature called the Speed Shift Technology, which allows the CPU to adjust the clock, with 15ms response time, in order to match the processing load. This probably requires certain support from the operating system, which is why Intel might have decided to only support Windows 10 OS. AMD also has a similar power management on its Zen CPU architecture.

Another feature that comes with AMD's upcoming Zen CPU architecture is the simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), which is similar to Intel's Hyper-Threading (HTT) technology, and shows each physical core as two logical CPUs to the OS. This feature needs close support from the OS and it might be one of the reasons that Microsoft has decided to limit support these new CPUs only to Windows 10 OS.

Hopefully, we will hear more about this issue soon, but for now, it appears you will have to pick Windows 10 OS if you want a new CPU. Thankfully, the Windows 10 OS is not half bad so it should not be a big issue.







Source: via Techpowerup.com.