Posted on Thursday, February 09 2017 @ 13:13 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
There were some reports last week that AMD is working on Windows 7 driver support for its upcoming Ryzen processors. In
a statement to PC World, AMD contradicted these rumors and said there will be no official support for the ageing operating system. AMD added that it verified Ryzen across Windows 7 and 10, but clarified that only Windows 10 will get support and drivers.
“To achieve the highest confidence in the performance of our AMD Ryzen desktop processors (formerly code-named ‘Summit Ridge’), AMD validated them across two different OS generations, Windows 7 and 10,” AMD said in a statement in response to a question from PCWorld. “However, only support and drivers for Windows 10 will be provided in AMD Ryzen desktop processor production parts.”
So there you have it, if you want to use Ryzen you will need Windows 10. AMD's position on this is exactly the same as Intel's. Of course, there's nothing that will prevent you from booting Windows 7 on a Kaby Lake or Ryzen-based system, but without proper drivers you are likely to run into compatibility, reliability and performance issues.
