Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy.
While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting the 16% IPC boost on Zen 5 and the big AI performance leap delivering up to 50 TOPS on the NPU side, an interesting drawback of the Ryzen AI 300 series that has managed to avoid getting media attention is the lack of support for Windows 10.
While this was just an unconfirmed rumour last month even though it was suggested by a supposed Lenovo China manager, we have now got confirmation from AMD itself that the report, that Strix point and newer CPUs and APUs will not support Windows 10 is true.
↫ Sayan Sen at NeoWin
Official support for Windows 10 is ending next year, so there is some reason to AMD’s madness, but at the same time, almost 70% of Windows users are currently using Windows 10, and leaving those users behind might not be the best idea AMD ever had. There is an argument to be made that at least a reasonable number of these people are still using Windows 10 not out of their own volition, but because of Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements, and as such, anyone buying a new AMD machine will just opt for the latest version of Windows out of habit, but I still think there’s a sizable contingent of people who actively choose Windows 10 over 11 for a whole host of reasons.
On a strongly related note, despite 2025 marking the end of regular support for Windows 10, Microsoft yesterday announced it’s expanding the the number of Insider channels for new Windows 10 features from one to two, adding a Beta tier below the existing Release Preview tier. Microsoft, too, will have to come to terms with the fact that with 70% of Windows users using Windows 10, they might not even be able to drop support for the operating system as early as next year. While this 70% number will surely slowly decrease over the next 12 months, with many people simply being unable to upgrade due to hardware limitations, I have a suspicion we might see an extension on that 2025 date.
Windows is on a rolling release cadence now – anyone pretending otherwise is, well, pretending.
Maybe so but most have rejected the “upgrade” to 11…. because its worse.
I mean I regularly see the context menu take SECONDS to respond.
I do not like the way this is worded. It’s not CPUs and APUs that support operating systems, rather it’s the operating systems that support the CPUs.
This makes me question the headline. The exact same drivers that work on windows 11 should just work on windows 10 as well, as long as they are packaged appropriately. It might even work without any new drivers. Did AMD really decide to do this, or is microsoft pulling the strings? Either of these cases is possible, but the article’s source does not provide much evidence that AMD are the primary party responsible for neglecting windows 10.
It’s probably more along the lines of AMD isn’t touting compatibility/support with an OS that is being EOL’d less than halfway through the warranty period of any devices sold at retail. There is a big difference between “Won’t work” and “isn’t supported”, after all.
No suprise for me. Support isn`t free, and support something, that will die in a year is waste of money.
Sure, but as AMD’s open specs could help Linux’s support, I’m not sure Windows CPU support can be done by Mr Nobody with a GCC compiler.
Marshal Jim Raynor,
Doesn’t windows 11 use the same driver model though? It’s not clear to me that windows 10/11 would require different drivers. Operating systems often work fine without CPU drivers because the BIOS typically provides support. This is why linux (and even old versions of windows) generally work without requiring targeted CPU drivers. I’m inclined to agree with Drumhellar, it’s possible these CPUs are perfectly compatible, but they might try to introduce superficial incompatibilities where none actually exist. MS have done it before.
It’s not worth it for AMD. The driver model may be similar enough, but it still requires a big deal of validation.
It may work, just AMD won`t support it. I think that bigger problems will be with integrated GPU than CPU itself.
Windows 10 doesn’t have NPU support, Windows 11 will have NPU support in the next big update. So it really won’t matter about the driver itself as without the AI back-end windows 10 will have no clue what to do with an NPU.
Microsoft’s recent decisions with Windows – w11 system requirements and the present Recall feature/fiasco have me scratching my head. These seem to me be huge own-goals. If they wanted windows on every desktop pc they have a funny way of going about it.
They own most of the PC desktop space. Most users are not tech enthusiasts obsessed with the stuff that most people in these sites are.
AMD cannot support Windows 10 unless/until MSFT puts in the work to give Windows 10 NPU support. ATM MSFT has only announced NPU support for Win 11 and without the support there isn’t any telling what Win 10 would see an NPU as, CPU? GPU? Who knows, but Win 10 would certainly have serious issues with a whole new chip with no internal support and as it says in TFA the new chips all have NPUs built in.