It looks like AMD’s Ryzen CPUs will not support Windows 7 after all

 To achieve the highest confidence in the performance of our AMD Ryzen desktop processors (formerly code-named ‘Summit Ridge’), AMD validated them across two different OS generations, Windows 7 and 10

 

However, only support and drivers for Windows 10 will be provided in AMD Ryzen desktop processor production parts.

 

There are several reasons why AMD are only supporting Windows 10, firstly that Microsoft no longer supports the OS outside of security updates and do not want hardware vendors to support their legacy OS. 

Windows 7 is also a very old OS by today’s standards, releasing back in 2009. This OS was developed before AMD’s Bulldozer architecture and is simply not designed to take advantages of the multitude of new features in Ryzen, making drivers for legacy platforms difficult to create and prevents older OS’ from using new hardware with optimal efficiency. 

Windows 7 was not created with Zen in mind, so it makes sense that the new architecture would have problems with the old OS that AMD would not expect. 

 

  

It seems that AMD has “verified” that Windows 7 PC based on Ryzen will boot, though they have not confirmed that the ageing OS supports the CPUs fully. It is likely that Windows 7 will not support certain sleep states within Ryzen and run into issues when in use. 

Without Microsoft willingly offering their full support to offer backwards compatibility, AMD and Intel have little choice but to drop support for older OS’, forcing PC builders to adopt Windows 10 and away from their older software platforms. 

 

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