Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10

[silicon_toad2000]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/

If you own a system with an Intel 6th generation Core processor—more memorably known as Skylake—and run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you'll have to think about upgrading to Windows 10 within the next 18 months. Microsoft announced today that after July 17, 2017, only the "most critical" security fixes will be released for those platforms and those fixes will only be made available if they don't "risk the reliability or compatibility" of Windows 7 and 8.1 on other (non-Skylake) systems.

The full range of compatibility and security fixes will be published for non-Skylake machines for Windows 7 until January 14 2020, and for Windows 8.1 until January 10 2023.

At the same time, we know many of these customers continue to rely on Windows 7 for its well understood reliability and compatibility. Windows 7 was designed nearly 10 years ago before any x86/x64 SOCs existed. For Windows 7 to run on any modern silicon, device drivers and firmware need to emulate Windows 7's expectations for interrupt processing, bus support, and power states—which is challenging for WiFi [sic], graphics, security, and more. As partners make customizations to legacy device drivers, services, and firmware settings, customers are likely to see regressions with Windows 7 ongoing servicing.

[WhiteLightningX]

sure hope it doesnt affect XP.... 

[Pri]

Not much reason to upgrade to these newer CPU's anyway. The improvements where performance is concerned is incredibly minor.

To give some perspective the Core i7 2600K (Sandy Bridge architecture) came out in January 2011. That's 5 years ago.

Check its scores (cpubenchmark suite):
Single Thread: 1944
Multi Thread: 8530

Now compare that to the highest end Quad Intel sell the brand new Skylake Core i7 6700K released a couple months ago.
Single Thread: 2326
Multi Thread: 11019

So it took Intel 5 years to increase single thread performance 19.6% and multi-threaded performance 29.1%. Not really that great.

[White Stripes]

intels biggest leaps were the 8088 > 80286 and the 80486 > OG Pentium .... Pentium to Core could be considered a nice bump up too since Core can do in roughly half the clock (judging by personal experience) what any of the Pentium line could do...