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Latest Kaby Lake, Zen chips will support only Windows 10

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Silver_Pharaoh said:
Skylake, (the Intel 6xxx chips right?) "support" Win 7 correct?
Rather, will MS support ME if I buy Skylake and use Win 7?
Click to expand...

Short answer-yes. M$ backpedaled some on that point, so W7 does support Skylake and should for the support life of W7. And, yup, Skylake i5 and i7 are the 6xxxx chips. One of the reasons I went ahead and got the 6700k is the likelihood that it will be the last fully supported chip for W7, so I may as well get the big dog. For 90% of users the i5s are more than enough, but I like hot rods. LOL
 
Microsoft reversed themselves and will support Skylake on Windows 7/8 for a while still. End of support date has been moved at least twice. They do not want to support Skylake on Windows 7/8 until their end of life, they say. For a couple of more years at least though.
We are hoping they will extend support date again...

Confession: I used Windows 8.0 and didn't switch to 8.1 until just recently. I felt Avira antivirus and Comodo firewall offered protection enough to do without Microsoft updates. I wager that people will continue using Windows 8.1 on Skylake even after Microsoft support ends.
I have Windows 10 also. It's right there for me to use... But it would introduce a headache that even supporters of Windows 10 on the forums have acknowledged.

[Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell] is Windows 10 minus DirectX 12.

Why not use 8 if you have a license for it? It has all the little advantages 10 has over 7.
 
c627627 said:
Microsoft reversed themselves and will support Skylake on Windows 7/8 for a while still. End of support date has been moved at least twice. They do not want to support Skylake on Windows 7/8 until their end of life, they say. For a couple of more years at least though.
We are hoping they will extend support date again...

Confession: I used Windows 8.0 and didn't switch to 8.1 until just recently. I felt Avira antivirus and Comodo firewall offered protection enough to do without Microsoft updates. I wager that people will continue using Windows 8.1 on Skylake even after Microsoft support ends.
I have Windows 10 also. It's right there for me to use... But it would introduce a headache that even supporters of Windows 10 on the forums have acknowledged.

[Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell] is Windows 10 minus DirectX 12.

Why not use 8 if you have a license for it? It has all the little advantages 10 has over 7.
Click to expand...

I don't have a Win8 licence though, otherwise Win8 + Classic Shell = awesome OS.
I hated Win8 until I heard you mention Classic Shell. Man what a difference it makes on my dad's laptop!
 
c627627 said:
Off and on I would see news article headlines about End of Support for Skylake, about how it was extended by 1 year, etc.
But prompted by your post, I looked into this from official sources and we can finally rest without worry, it is official there will be no premature end for Skylake support.
Proof:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/11675/windows-7-windows-8-1-skylake-systems-supported

1/14/2020 Windows 7
1/10/2023 Windows 8


View attachment 183299
Click to expand...


Sweet! So Skylake is an option for me in the future. That's pretty cool!
Thanks!!
 
Yes!
And I mean, there are not too many things that are certain in this life... but there are two things you can take to the bank:


1. Michael Jackson is a musical genius who was taken away from us too soon :D
and
B. :) Instructions on how to run Windows 8 on Kaby Lake and Zen will be posted on this forum... ;)


...but that's very different from getting Microsoft support for them and official drivers for them, those you will only get for Skylake until 2023, and then that's the end of the line.
 
Alaric said:
Short answer-yes. M$ backpedaled some on that point, so W7 does support Skylake and should for the support life of W7. And, yup, Skylake i5 and i7 are the 6xxxx chips. One of the reasons I went ahead and got the 6700k is the likelihood that it will be the last fully supported chip for W7, so I may as well get the big dog. For 90% of users the i5s are more than enough, but I like hot rods. LOL
Click to expand...

Somewhat offtopic-

What was the last fully supported chip for Windows XP? What about 98SE?

Even though I realize that like the discussion here, modern CPUs would work on older OSs but new instruction sets/power states might not be supported. There are youtube videos of 98SE on an i7 for example.
 
c627627 said:
Yes!
And I mean, there are not too many things that are certain in this life... but there are two things you can take to the bank:


1. Michael Jackson is a musical genius who was taken away from us too soon :D
and
B. :) Instructions on how to run Windows 8 on Kaby Lake and Zen will be posted on this forum... ;)


...but that's very different from getting Microsoft support for them and official drivers for them, those you will only get for Skylake until 2023, and then that's the end of the line.
Click to expand...


That's only one thing....??? LOL
 
:) ;)


Culbrelai said:
Somewhat offtopic-

What was the last fully supported chip for Windows XP? What about 98SE?

Even though I realize that like the discussion here, modern CPUs would work on older OSs but new instruction sets/power states might not be supported. There are youtube videos of 98SE on an i7 for example.
Click to expand...

This is an excellent question.
It has been said that an OS can still "work" and not use some of the new features, which most of us wouldn't even notice...
What exactly is the list of those features that are not being utilized by various past operating system versions and are only being used by the newest-latest OS?
 
I got the pm from C6, sorry for coming into the discussion late. Busy month.

I was unaware of Zen and Skylake being Win10 only. From a consumer side, it would make sense to force upgrade everyone to new OSs and the like. Legacy is starting to get harder to manage and support, especially if we are talking about OS's sticking around for 10+years with a new version every 2-3yrs. Outside of legacy support, there really is no other answer to the restriction. BIOS teams need to move away from anything but UEFI as no one wants to program in ASM these days. Additionally new instruction sets that work natively with better APIs and Bus technologies are available at firmware level only rather than driver support. This means, that your options for IO are limited with each generation of silicon and OS.

There is a live demonstration of legacy vs push for new going on right now. DX12 vs DX11 with the latest GPUs. Benchmarks show that the latest gpus have issues with DX11 at 1080p, but increase resolution or move up to DX12, and these cards start showing the performance you would expect. As a company, why would I want to support legacy, when my latest silicon will work worse than my last generation silicon?

All in all, this change is a healthy change. Its needed for consumers, and will only really affect a small margin in PC consumption. Those that will complain wont last long. My suggestion, keep some legacy parts for legacy games. Build another computer for DX12, because you'll need it.
 
Dolk said:
I got the pm from C6, sorry for coming into the discussion late. Busy month.

I was unaware of Zen and Skylake being Win10 only. From a consumer side, it would make sense to force upgrade everyone to new OSs and the like. Legacy is starting to get harder to manage and support, especially if we are talking about OS's sticking around for 10+years with a new version every 2-3yrs. Outside of legacy support, there really is no other answer to the restriction. BIOS teams need to move away from anything but UEFI as no one wants to program in ASM these days. Additionally new instruction sets that work natively with better APIs and Bus technologies are available at firmware level only rather than driver support. This means, that your options for IO are limited with each generation of silicon and OS.

There is a live demonstration of legacy vs push for new going on right now. DX12 vs DX11 with the latest GPUs. Benchmarks show that the latest gpus have issues with DX11 at 1080p, but increase resolution or move up to DX12, and these cards start showing the performance you would expect. As a company, why would I want to support legacy, when my latest silicon will work worse than my last generation silicon?

All in all, this change is a healthy change. Its needed for consumers, and will only really affect a small margin in PC consumption. Those that will complain wont last long. My suggestion, keep some legacy parts for legacy games. Build another computer for DX12, because you'll need it.
Click to expand...

Do you have any good links that show DX12 game improvement over DX11?
 
The games I play are likely a long ways off from DX 12, if ever. My Skylake and W7 will serve me well for a long time. In 3-4 years I can grab an used GTX 1070 and probably be happy for another 5 years.
 
@Wingman,

Your question leads to the assumption you can take any DX11 game and make it DX12. This is somewhat true, but the game designer has to enable the API and make changes to how their engine calls the API.

For direct comparison you can look at DOOM or Total War: Warhammer.

OPENGL vs Vulkan in DOOM
DX11 vs DX12 for Total War: Warhammer (Bonus, breakdown by vendor)

The two examples above show how much of a gain there is between the old gen APIs and the next gen APIs. The latest APIs (Vulkan and DX12) exploit firmware level control on the GPU, rather than relying on the driver to translate the API calls into firmware control signals. This is a massive gain in operational performance. There is less bottle neck on the CPU, and more gain on the GPU. Furthermore, the APIs are able to start natively enabling advanced hardware features that required custom driver and silicon. Remember Lucid, their product was to enable mGPU support across all GPUs. They had a huge problem with driver side because AMD and NVIDIA had two different styles of exploiting the DX11-DX9 API calls. Lucid's dream (heh) is a reality now that the API can handle calling any GPU regardless of driver support. There are a ton more gains that were created with these new APIs.

Eurogamer's breakdown on DX12 improvements is a great article
 
Dolk said:
@Wingman,

Your question leads to the assumption you can take any DX11 game and make it DX12. This is somewhat true, but the game designer has to enable the API and make changes to how their engine calls the API.

For direct comparison you can look at DOOM or Total War: Warhammer.

OPENGL vs Vulkan in DOOM
DX11 vs DX12 for Total War: Warhammer (Bonus, breakdown by vendor)

The two examples above show how much of a gain there is between the old gen APIs and the next gen APIs. The latest APIs (Vulkan and DX12) exploit firmware level control on the GPU, rather than relying on the driver to translate the API calls into firmware control signals. This is a massive gain in operational performance. There is less bottle neck on the CPU, and more gain on the GPU. Furthermore, the APIs are able to start natively enabling advanced hardware features that required custom driver and silicon. Remember Lucid, their product was to enable mGPU support across all GPUs. They had a huge problem with driver side because AMD and NVIDIA had two different styles of exploiting the DX11-DX9 API calls. Lucid's dream (heh) is a reality now that the API can handle calling any GPU regardless of driver support. There are a ton more gains that were created with these new APIs.

Eurogamer's breakdown on DX12 improvements is a great article
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links however Nvidia GTX 1080, 1070 is much worse with DX12 than DX11. From reading different articles I get the impression the low level API does not work well with Nvidia GPU architecture or is Nvidia drivers getting in the way of low level hardware communication by the API?
 
I can't say I know the exact reason to Nvidia's low performance in DX12, but this is what I do know.

With DX9-11, the firmware calls were handled by the driver. Nvidia, being Nvidia, developed their own drivers to handle the API calls, and utilize their hardware architecture at a higher degree than AMD. Nvidia, designed their software first, than the hardware came a long exploiting the software capabilities. DX has a standard, and hardware can be designed around this standard so that all API calls look like a firmware call. Nvidia went the route of translating all API calls to their firmware. As we saw with just about each generation of Nvidia cards, they excelled above AMD. Now the game has changed. The API can perform firmware calls without the need of a driver (we are close to no driver needed). This makes it harder for Nvidia to translate API calls to its hardware architecture. Since Nvidia hardware is not designed around the DX spec to the 'T', Nvidia must spend clock cycles on translation and optimization.

On the other hand AMD has always designed hardware to spec. If you read a lot of industry news, AMD is a leader in spec design and contribution. One of the main reasons DX11 to DX12 and OPENGL to Vulkan has been such a smooth transition is due to Mantel. It helped designers start to work without a driver and work with API calls to firmware. AMD also started to add in DX12 capabilities in their R9 200 series GPUs (because of Mantel). AMD being almost all hardware and no software is a huge win for them in this current API generation. They will probably continue to lead for a bit longer until Nvidia comes back with a new architecture.

Now don't come back showing 1080 beating Fury X and saying I'm wrong. You throw enough power into any machine, and it will still outperform a more optimized, slower machine. Arguably, I would say wait for Fury X2 vs 1080/Titan.


My point to this post, and my last, is that the game has changed under the hood. To consumers, it looks like normal business except that they are being forced to upgrade for the first time. Hardware has been leading the computer industry for a long time, and software has lacked a lot of exploit power. New software packages are coming out to exploit the hardware we have had for years. Its a new era, and its going to be a good one.
 
Last edited:
I'll never install windows 10. I don't care if it spits $ out from your local printer. The only thing MS is forcing is their inevitable death and mass migration to Linux where everything is for and by the user primarily. Eventually even newer more open chip designs will follow. I would no longer follow ms into their personal viewpoint of the future than I would follow yours.
Everything I own is hackable except for my phone and I can already see it's death.
 
Dolk said:
I can't say I know the exact reason to Nvidia's low performance in DX12, but this is what I do know.

With DX9-11, the firmware calls were handled by the driver. Nvidia, being Nvidia, developed their own drivers to handle the API calls, and utilize their hardware architecture at a higher degree than AMD. Nvidia, designed their software first, than the hardware came a long exploiting the software capabilities. DX has a standard, and hardware can be designed around this standard so that all API calls look like a firmware call. Nvidia went the route of translating all API calls to their firmware. As we saw with just about each generation of Nvidia cards, they excelled above AMD. Now the game has changed. The API can perform firmware calls without the need of a driver (we are close to no driver needed). This makes it harder for Nvidia to translate API calls to its hardware architecture. Since Nvidia hardware is not designed around the DX spec to the 'T', Nvidia must spend clock cycles on translation and optimization.

On the other hand AMD has always designed hardware to spec. If you read a lot of industry news, AMD is a leader in spec design and contribution. One of the main reasons DX11 to DX12 and OPENGL to Vulkan has been such a smooth transition is due to Mantel. It helped designers start to work without a driver and work with API calls to firmware. AMD also started to add in DX12 capabilities in their R9 200 series GPUs (because of Mantel). AMD being almost all hardware and no software is a huge win for them in this current API generation. They will probably continue to lead for a bit longer until Nvidia comes back with a new architecture.

Now don't come back showing 1080 beating Fury X and saying I'm wrong. You throw enough power into any machine, and it will still outperform a more optimized, slower machine. Arguably, I would say wait for Fury X2 vs 1080/Titan.


My point to this post, and my last, is that the game has changed under the hood. To consumers, it looks like normal business except that they are being forced to upgrade for the first time. Hardware has been leading the computer industry for a long time, and software has lacked a lot of exploit power. New software packages are coming out to exploit the hardware we have had for years. Its a new era, and its going to be a good one.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the information that I could not find on the web. The future sounds good with a minimal driver like a console, from what you said I will defiantly wait till Nvidia makes a video card for DX12. So I just want to understand what you are saying when you said (firmware calls) is that system memory, also Is (DX) the API?
 
from what you said I will defiantly wait till Nvidia makes a video card for DX12.
Click to expand...

Kenrou said:
Been doing them for a while now :

http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/technology/dx12/supported-gpus
Click to expand...

What Dolk is saying, Nvidia divers come with overhead Nividia can support DX9-DX12. The future of DX12 is no driver overhead like AMD video cards.

Even my old Nvidia GTX 570 supports DirectX12. It is hard to explain what we are taking about, all I can say one video card dose not do all jobs well, just look at the Nvidai DX11 vs DX12 Bench marks link http://www.pcgamer.com/total-war-wa...md-still-cant-match-nvidias-dx11-performance/
GTX 570 DX12 link. http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-570

So in short it will be a total change for Nvidia to engineer a video card that works with the low level API of DX12 so they don't do it with Drivers insted.
Have a look at this Video.
 
Woa, I'm not calling DX12 a driverless API. A driver is still needed, but APIs just have more access to firmware level controls.

Firmware calls/controls refers to the actual instruction set calling of the hardware device. A GPU is commanded through the PCIe bus. A software normally cannot communicate with a hardware device unless there is a driver to translate to the firmware instruction set. Now if the firmware had a complete standard that the software could exploit and utilize, than a driver is only needed to handle calls that are outside the software's control. DX12 and other APIs have a set of commands that need to be brought down to the firmware instruction set level in order for hardware to understand the commands.

I have a very limited understanding of this field, and I've basically have gone through all the examples I can muster. :)

As for Nvidia, the 10xx series is a DX12 card. However, their software and hardware is not as mature as AMD for direct API support. They will need time to adapt. The 10xx series can do a decent job with games, but Nvidia is having to release a new driver for every big title that enables DX12. Continuing development like that is difficult. I'd expect a quick refresh from Nvidia or a new driver solution package for their 10xx series. But thats a novice guess.
 
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