Windows 7, 10, and Skylake?

There’s been a lot of furor and FUD around Windows 7 on the upcoming Skylake platform being blocked or not?

Has anyone seen a revision to the x86 instruction set? We certainly haven’t. We’d most certainly have seen something somewhere about it.

There most certainly has been changes to the processor’s periphery in additional instruction sets for various tasks the CPU would perform in a given era. The Intel/AMD platforms are littered with their various efforts over the last two decades.

The only way we see something like this happening, where an OS won’t run on a certain platform, is by hard coding that into the OS. In the case of Windows 7, that would mean backporting a patch of some sort. Folks would figure out RPQ what patch caused the hard-code and that would be the end of that for many.

We realize Microsoft wants folks to move to Windows 10. There’s a huge revenue opportunity to be had there.

However, surreptitiously going about it with sneaky ads, involuntary downloads to users computers, delivery of the OS to ADDS based environments unannounced (coming to a domain near you), and any other clandestine methodology will, and is, do a lot of harm.

Pushing, pulling, and dragging folks who are kicking and screaming to be left where they are is not a good way to go about it.

[/.25c]

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book