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AMD has preemptively dropped support for Windows 10 on its new Ryzen AI 300 Series chips (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In another attempt to convince us that "AI PCs" are somehow fundamentally different from the PCs we're already using, AMD has officially dropped support for Windows 10 from its new AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series platform. This can be observed by glancing at the official AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 specs page, which now only lists 64-bit versions of Windows 11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu as having official support.

Is this a big deal? It depends on how much you like using Windows while also disliking Windows 11. Personally, I prefer Windows 10 as a daily driver, and will only resort to Windows 11 use for professional needs.

That said, the gaming performance and compatibility of Linux operating systems get better every day, so dropping Windows 10 shouldn't necessarily be a deal breaker for these CPUs. After all, the Ryzen 9 AI 9 HX 370 can perform formidably, even in Silent mode. But users who were interested in those laptops and wished to downgrade to Windows 10 are now totally out of luck, it seems.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Ok, so, no official support for Windows 10, but can you still install and run Windows 10 and renouce whatever "support" or will it just not work?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean, they list Red Hat and Ubuntu as the only OFFICIALLY supported Linux distros and both of those are based on other “non-supported” distros, so I don’t think it means much.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Red Hat (RHEL) is not based on any other distro, like Ubuntu is with Debian. RHEL is downstream of Fedora, meaning that RHEL developers can work on code that affects Fedora AND RHEL. This is not really true of Debian and Ubuntu. They are distinct projects with different goals. In many ways, Ubuntu is beholden to what Debian does. This isn’t usually a problem because Debian is very conservative in its approach to software. Ubuntu doesn’t usually have to worry about Debian screwing with something Ubuntu is trying to do.

Which, is all to say that there is no other distribution you can officially equate to RHEL like you can with Debian & Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The person was asking a fairly simple question and I gave an answer that avoided jumping into the genealogy of GNU/Linux based distributions. Many apologies, won’t happen again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I mean you were pretty damn correct in your statement. Fedora is not officially supported, neither is Debian, a couple popular derivatives are though. My guess is Canonical and IBM were willing to add stuff to make AMD feel confident enough to list them as "Officially" supported.

Personally I'm not a fan of RHEL or Ubuntu but absolutely love Debian. Part of me feels like I would like RHEL if I used it enough, but I use Window's daily at work and still don't like it...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

It will probably just work, even if not officially. If any weird Windows issues crop up, Microsoft may or may not fix them. I think AMD even provided workarounds and special drivers for Windows 7, just without any official support. They may not do that this time around though, since a lot of things have changed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

According to this article, regarding Intel Alder Lake

Intel's Thread Director technology is the key here. This hardware-based technology uses a trained AI model to identify different types of workloads at the chip level. It then provides that enhanced telemetry data to Windows 11 via a Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) built into the chip. The operating system then uses that data to help assure that threads are scheduled to either the P- or E-cores in an optimized and intelligent manner.

However, while Windows 11 exploits Thread Director's full feature set, Windows 10 does not. Due to optimizations for Intel's Lakefield chips, Windows 10 is aware of hybrid topologies, meaning it knows the difference between the performance and efficiency of the different core types. Still, it doesn't have access to the thread-specific telemetry provided by Intel's hardware-based solution.

As a result, threads can and will land on the incorrect cores under some circumstances, which Intel says will result in run-to-run variability in benchmarks. It will also impact the chips during normal use, too. Intel says the difference amounts to a few percentage points of performance and that the chips still provide an "awesome" user experience. We'll have to see how that works in the real world to assess the impact.

Intel also says that users can assign the priority of background tasks through the standard Windows settings, but these global settings apply to all programs. So it remains to be seen if that will have a meaningful impact on performance variability in Windows 10.

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-shares-alder-lake-pricing-specs-and-gaming-performance/4

so, it's still works but not optimized for some apps. Probably this will be the same with AMD's latest CPU.