AMD changes mind: Ryzen CPUs WON'T be officially supported in Windows 7

AMD will not provide support and drivers to run its upcoming Ryzen CPUs under Windows 7. The processors are tested for Windows 7 but official support and drivers will only be provided for Windows 10, according to an official statement from AMD.

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The information comes from the German website Heise.de which received an English statement from AMD stating, "To achieve the highest confidence in the performance of our AMD Ryzen desktop processors (formerly codenamed "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."

This is a turnaround from previous statements in which the chip manufacturer stated it would provide drivers for Windows 7. Several days ago it was first reported by Computerbase.de who claimed AMD stated this during an information session, the news was later confirmed by Heise.de when the website asked AMD.

It's unclear why AMD changed its mind, Heise could not reach the company by telephone and emails were no longer answered.

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The upcoming Ryzen CPUs should make AMD competitive to Intel again. When the news broke that AMD's latest generation CPUs would be officially supported under Windows 7 it received a lot of applause. It would make the CPUs extra attractive to a lot of users as Intel's latest Kaby Lake CPUs is only supported by  Windows 10.

Given the fact that more than 40% of all computers worldwide are running Windows 7, support for the OS would give AMD an unique selling point.

AMD's Ryzen CPUs should become available in March, the line is expected to premiere with a 8 core CPU with 16 threads that should be much cheaper that similar Intel CPUs.

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