Tuesday, September 6th 2016
SMT and Power Management Behind "Kaby Lake" and "ZEN" Windows 10 Restrictions
Microsoft recently sparked a stir when it was reported that the company will support upcoming CPU architectures by Intel and AMD only on Windows 10, with the keyword being "support" and not "compatibility." This means that Microsoft will offer customer-support and likely serve updates to Intel "Kaby Lake" and AMD "ZEN" machines only running Windows 10 (and its enterprise variant Windows Server 2016, based on the NT 10 kernel), and not older versions of Windows. The processors themselves are compatible with any x86 operating system, Windows or *nix, 32-bit or 64-bit. HotHardware dug out the likely causes of this decision.
Apparently, new power-management and SMT features are behind the decision. With its "Kaby Lake" microarchitecture, Intel is introducing a new power-management feature called Speed Shift Technology. This lets the processor adjust its clock-speed to match processing loads at response time of 15 ms. This likely requires OS-level hooks, so the on-die power-management components can poll for processing loads and accordingly raise or lower clock-speeds 66.66 times each second, at no CPU cost. In its ZEN microarchitecture reveal, AMD too spoke about fine-grained, multi-domain clock-gating (≠ power-gating) on its "ZEN" based processors, such as "Summit Ridge."
AMD "ZEN" processors introduce simultaneous multi-threading, a feature that exposes each physical core as two logical CPUs to the OS, for better utilization of on-die resources. Intel's implementation of SMT is the HyperThreading Technology (HTT), and has been around for over a decade. AMD's SMT implementation isn't identical to that of HyperThreading, with the two threads on a CPU competing for resources in a method unique to AMD. This can't work without the OS kernel and scheduler being aware of the method. You'll remember that Microsoft had to update the kernel and scheduler of Windows 7 in a similar way, to optimize it for "Bulldozer."
These, HotHardware argues, could be the likely reasons why Microsoft is limiting support for the new CPU microarchitectures to Windows 10.
Source:
HotHardware
Apparently, new power-management and SMT features are behind the decision. With its "Kaby Lake" microarchitecture, Intel is introducing a new power-management feature called Speed Shift Technology. This lets the processor adjust its clock-speed to match processing loads at response time of 15 ms. This likely requires OS-level hooks, so the on-die power-management components can poll for processing loads and accordingly raise or lower clock-speeds 66.66 times each second, at no CPU cost. In its ZEN microarchitecture reveal, AMD too spoke about fine-grained, multi-domain clock-gating (≠ power-gating) on its "ZEN" based processors, such as "Summit Ridge."
These, HotHardware argues, could be the likely reasons why Microsoft is limiting support for the new CPU microarchitectures to Windows 10.
57 Comments on SMT and Power Management Behind "Kaby Lake" and "ZEN" Windows 10 Restrictions
And I wouldn't call Win7 obsolete, it's more than capable still. It's just that it's unrealistic to expect new hardware support to be added to it.
All things considered, MS has been extremely lenient with the Windows adoption. Yes they pushed it a little, but given the disaster that was Windows XP (and the stagnation that has come with it) I can fully understand that push - even so you always had the opportunity to make a conscious choice of going back to W7 or 8. They gave away 'free' license upgrades for a full year and they support the older OS until 2020.
Now compare that to Android system support for phones, or the forced iOS and OSX updates that cripple your hardware over time and you can see how well MS is doing in the larger scheme of things. If this is MS's version of 'planned obsolescence' then I would really like more of that with other companies.
The only way one could consider windows XP is a disaster is if they are considering Microsoft's push to upgrade. In what way is Microsoft's most popular OS a bad thing? The fact that people stuck to that OS shines to it's popularity.
You know a company is ass backwards when their currently most popular OS isn't getting an update for the latest hardware. I guess that's why I see more and more people moving to linux, mac, and android.
And you totally didn't have the opportunity to roll back to Win 7, right? Also, it's extremely typical that these 'ninja installs' happened only on the least tech savvy of people, probably the same people who click every dialog box OK they see and then wonder why all of a sudden their 'browser is magically hacked or infected'.
Go home please. You mistake 'most popular' with downright lazy and general not-giving-a-shit PC users. If you still ran XP when Windows 10 was released, that's all it is and all it will ever be. Also, none of this changes the other facts I put forward and that you happily ignore, such as the fact that there will not be a single W7 OEM PC with Kaby Lake or Zen on it.
Here is a tree... you know what to do... BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG HUGS! :)
I'm puzzled every day