Has Microsoft given any justification as to why Intel 6th and 7th Gen, along with Zen 1, will not be supported by Windows 11?

[YoungBlade]

We all know that Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Coffee Lake Refresh, and Comet Lake are just Skylake 1, Skylake 2, Skylake 3, etc. There is nothing fundamental to the architecture that was changed - just core counts and some minor improvments to IPC (<10% across all 5 generations). In a similar way, Zen+ (Ryzen 2000) is just a refined version of Zen. There were improvements, but not anything major was changed.

 

On their official website, they talk about wanting users to have a good computing experience, but they list old Coffee Lake Celeron chips as being supported - no one on a G4900 is having a good computing experience using Windows 11 - just an i3 6100 would give you a massively better time. So they seem to be locking it down based on architecture rather than by how good the CPU actually is.

 

And yes, those older systems are less likely to have support for TPM, but plenty of them still do. And all of them would support Secure Boot. So you're going to have plenty of folks where the PC Health Check only says that their processor isn't supported, with everything else good.

 

So, why is Microsoft denying users of 6th and 7th gen, along with original Zen CPUs, the ability to upgrade to Windows 11?

 

All I can find online is speculation about it being a thing OEMs pushed for to sell more PCs through planned obsolescence - which may well be the case, but I'd like to know if there has been any actual statement by Microsoft themselves that attempts to explain their reasoning.

[Agall]

8 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

We all know that Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Coffee Lake Refresh, and Comet Lake are just Skylake 1, Skylake 2, Skylake 3, etc. There is nothing fundamental to the architecture that was changed - just core counts and some minor improvments to IPC (<10% across all 5 generations). In a similar way, Zen+ (Ryzen 2000) is just a refined version of Zen. There were improvements, but not anything major was changed.

 

On their official website, they talk about wanting users to have a good computing experience, but they list old Coffee Lake Celeron chips as being supported - no one on a G4900 is having a good computing experience using Windows 11 - just an i3 6100 would give you a massively better time. So they seem to be locking it down based on architecture rather than by how good the CPU actually is.

 

And yes, those older systems are less likely to have support for TPM, but plenty of them still do. And all of them would support Secure Boot. So you're going to have plenty of folks where the PC Health Check only says that their processor isn't supported, with everything else good.

 

So, why is Microsoft denying users of 6th and 7th gen, along with original Zen CPUs, the ability to upgrade to Windows 11?

 

All I can find online is speculation about it being a thing OEMs pushed for to sell more PCs through planned obsolescence - which may well be the case, but I'd like to know if there has been any actual statement by Microsoft themselves that attempts to explain their reasoning.

I thought it was because of the TPM version, but I haven't looked into it again yet.

 

The i7-7700K meet the minimun requierments to run Win11. But its not suported, Why? - Microsoft Community Hub

 

There's not even an instruction set extension difference, so it does seem like planned obsolescence.

[Levent]

This is what I had in my reddit saved posts for a while. It was lack of HCVI support.

 

[Agall]

5 minutes ago, Levent said:

This is what I had in my reddit saved posts for a while. It was lack of HCVI support.

 

Apparently HVCI at the hardware level was added in 8th gen.

[OddOod]

Same story as always. Security. But I thought you could work around those limitations and install W11 on most intel CPUs 4th gen and later?

[YoungBlade]

1 minute ago, OddOod said:

Same story as always. Security. But I thought you could work around those limitations and install W11 on most intel CPUs 4th gen and later?

You can, and that works for us here. But for the average person, all they'll do (if they do anything) is run the PC Health Check, see that their CPU isn't supported, and then buy a new system.

 

Also, from my understanding, Microsoft has no intention of keeping compatibility with these - so at any point in the future, a future H1/H2 release or even a regular Windows Update might ruin compatibility for a reason that is not easily worked around.

 

11 minutes ago, Levent said:

This is what I had in my reddit saved posts for a while. It was lack of HVCI support.

It seems odd to me that this would be required considering that, from my understanding, running Windows 11 in a hypervisor environment is an optional feature.

 

Either way, it would be nice if Microsoft was up-front about exactly what it is that makes a CPU supported or not, rather than just giving a seemingly random list.

[Agall]

4 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

it would be nice if Microsoft was up-front 

*Microsoft*

[OddOod]

5 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

You can, and that works for us here. But for the average person, all they'll do (if they do anything) is run the PC Health Check, see that their CPU isn't supported, and then buy a new system.

 

 

You're not wrong. I think that they are probably trying to do what apple did pre-ARM transition which was killing off a lot of legacy things. This is gonna be a slow boil, but we're likely hitting the floor on transistor size soon (maybe 20 years) so we'll need a new place to improve and optimize. 

[LAwLz]

There is no technical reason for it. 

 

I also speculated about things like VBS, MBEC and HVCI support for a while but then things fell flat when I started looking into which processors had or didn't have those features, and how they matched up with the Windows 11 requirements.

 

 

Then the vice president of OS security and enterprise at Microsoft flat out said that there were no specific features that caused the cutoff. Microsoft just felt like it was a good place to cut support at for a wide range of reasons like "quality, support and reliability".

 

 

 

So if you are asking why Zen isn't supported but Zen+ is then the answer is "because Microsoft said so".

There is no technical reason for it. They just felt like it was old enough that they could exclude it when drawing their line in the sand. They wanted to draw the line and had to draw it somewhere.

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, OddOod said:

But I thought you could work around those limitations and install W11 on most intel CPUs 4th gen and later?

You can run it on a Core 2.