End of an era: Intel might move to outsourcing for chip manufacture

For years now, one of the things that has most clearly separated AMD and Intel was simply where their chips were physically made.

AMD, lagging behind Intel in almost every measurable way, sold off their chip foundries years ago to cut costs and raise capital, in a move which was largely considered indicative of their weak position at the time. Intel, by comparison, continued to own their own chip foundries, preserving a degree of vertical integration which was generally seen as a competitive strength.

But Intel has struggled to update their chip manufacture processes; their recent announcement that next year's Rocket Lake processor will, once again, be a 14nm chip, at a time when rival AMD is rumoured to be planning a move from 7nm to 5nm, speaks clearly to Intel's struggles in moving beyond 14nm chips to reach even 10nm, which would still be well behind the curve in terms of processor manufacturing.

If that last para made very little sense to you, here are the Coles notes: smaller is better when it comes to microprocessors, with smaller chip elements allowing chips to be smaller while having more capabilities, drawing less power, generating less heat, and running faster. This is the heart of Moore's Law, with the increasing areal density of transistors resulting in an exponential increase in computing power.

AMD's 7nm processors aren't just smaller; they're also better-designed, which is why their Zen 3 generation of Ryzen chips now outperforms Intel's products in every measurable way. But AMD didn't have to figure out the manufacturing process for Ryzen; TSMC had done that already, so AMD could just focus on design. Suddenly, what had seemed like a competitive disadvantage (i.e. AMD being forced to rely on a third party to bring the products to market) works to AMD's advantage.

So it probably shouldn't be a surprise that Intel, after spending the last several years being clobbered by AMD+TSMC, are finally flirting with outsourcing chip production themselves. As reported by The Oregonian:

Intel is laying the groundwork to toss the old model out the window. It is openly flirting with the notion of moving leading-edge production from Oregon to Asia and hiring one of its top rivals to make Intel’s most advanced chips.

The company says a decision is likely in January.

It’s a momentous choice that follows a string of manufacturing setbacks at the Ronler Acres campus near Hillsboro Stadium, failures that have cost Intel its cherished leadership in semiconductor technology – perhaps forever.

There's no guarantee that Intel will do this, of course; even if they do move forward, there's no guarantee that this change will save them (AMD's processors aren't just smaller, remember - they're also better-designed). But the simple fact that Intel are considering this move speaks to the weakness of their position; much like the AMD of years ago, Intel might just have no choice but to outsource, if they want to stay in business. Rocket Lake was their last, desperate attempt to steal some of AMD's Zen 3 thunder, and it totally failed; most tech media outlets didn't even notice the Rocket Lake announcement, or care, which is pretty much the prevailing sentiment where Intel are concerned, generally.

Intel are in serious trouble; they might not be on the verge of insolvency, but they are on the verge of irrelevancy, if they aren't already completely irrelevant to a PC industry that they were totally lording it over just two years ago. After years spent charging premium prices for tiny performance increases, moving to outsourcing now may just be too little, too late. 

Whatever the outcome, though, there's no doubt that a solid decade of Intel dominion over the PC is well and truly over. That era is at an end.

Another baby step for VR

VR still has a long, long way to go, but developments like this might help. From WCCFTech:

An industry consortium lead by Nvidia, Oculus, Valve, AMD, and Microsoft have today introduced the VirtualLink specification which is an open standard for next-generation VR headsets to connect to PCs and other similar devices with a single high bandwidth USB Type-C connector, forgoing the mess of cables that have traditionally plagued VR gaming.

The Connection is an alternate mode of USB-C should simplify and speed up the setup time for your VR gear avoiding one of the major inconveniences of having and using a VR headset in a room where it isn’t always connected. It should also make VR experiences much easier with smaller devices like laptops and notebooks.

[...]

This may also help in the long term with the need to provide higher display resolutions and high bandwidth cameras for tracking. VirtualLink connects with VR headsets to simultaneously deliver four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, which are scalable for future needs; a USB3.1 data channel for supporting high-resolution cameras and sensors; and up to 27 watts of power.

One of the nicer things about VirtualLink is that it has been purpose built for VR with optimizing latency and keying in on bandwidth demands to make the next generation of VR experiences a much better one.

Several of the major VR players are part of this initiative, though, which gives it a better chance to succeed than it would have otherwise, but it will be years before VirtualLink stars appearing on the market in actual VR devices, and years more before it can become the VR industry standard. Notably absent from the VirtualLink consortium, too, are Sony and Samsung, who currently have the two best-selling VR devices on the market in PSVR and GearVR, which could mean trouble for this newborn VR device standard.

Still... progress is progress, and this is a baby step in a direction that many analysts say VR needs to go. A lack of hardware standards isn't VR's biggest problem, obviously, but it is a problem, and VirtualLink could help bring some much-needed standardization to the VR industry.

In case you missed it:Intel CPUs have another security flaw

At this point, I don't supposed that this will really surprise anyone, but it's happened again:

A team of researchers at the Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, say they were able to leverage the security weakness to extract crypto keys from another running program in 99.8 of tests on an Intel Skylake Core i7-6700K desktop CPU; 98.2 percent of tests on an Intel Broadwell Xeon E5-2620 v4 server CPU; and 99.8 per cent of tests on a Coffeelake part.

Their code was able to lift a secret 256-bit key, used to cryptographically sign data, from another program while it performed a signing operation with libgcrypt’s Curve 25519 EdDSA implementation. It took roughly 17 seconds to determine each of the keys using machine-learning software and some brute force, according to a paper detailing the attack, seen by The Register this week.

[...]

The extraction technique is not reliant on speculative execution, and thus is unrelated to Spectre and Meltdown. Instead, it builds upon the exploitation of Intel's Hyper-Threading technology and the processor caches to leak data, which is a known security problem with its own mitigations.

Have I mentioned lately how relieved I am to have stuck with AMD, all these years?

Important points:

1. TLBleed is unrelated to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that Google Project Zero reported back in January; it's an entirely new category of vulnerability, and one which Intel's competitors apparently don't share.
2. TLBleed affects Intel CPUs ranging from Broadwell to Coffee Lake, i.e. every Intel CPU released since 2014, including their newest (Broadwell was followed by Skylake, and then by Kaby Lake, although The Reg's coverage doesn't specifically mention Kaby Lake). So, once again, we're talking about a lot of affected PCs.

Intel, naturally, has "no plans to specifically address a side-channel vulnerability in its processors that can be potentially exploited by malware to extract encryption keys and other sensitive info from applications." Because why would Intel have a plan? Or, really, a clue? Look for this messaging to change as this story gains traction, though... and then for Intel comments to dry up entirely, once the class action lawsuits start. Because they will start, and it won't take long.

And don't think that Whiskey Lake or Cannon Lake are going to fix the issues, either; both of those are just variations on Skylake/Kaby Lake.

Intel have clearly been playing way too fast for way too long with consumers' security in the name of eking out a little extra performance over AMD, and with no clear plan for what they'd do when it started to come back to bite them. TLBleed is now the fourth serious security vulnerability to be found in Intel's hardware in just a year, starting with Intel's TME, Meltdown, and Spectre, with only Spectre reaching well beyond Intel. I don't expect it to be the last.

NVidia GPP is dead

Weirdly for an admitted AMD man, NVIDIA's GeForce Partner Program's antitrust problems had largely flown beneath my notice until today... when NVIDIA killed it. Because of its antitrust problems. Yay?

From WCCFTech:

Almost a month after news first broke of NVIDIA’s GPP program and the anti-trust allegations surrounding it – the company has pulled the plug on what can be accurately called one of the most infamous marketing and branding experiments in graphics card history. [...]

This is something that can only be claimed as a victory for gamers because regardless of what the company terms this as, the fact remains that we saw major branding moves happen in this space including the launch of ASUS AREZ as well as MSI and Gigabyte removing the Gaming branding from Radeon flavored graphics cards. It is unclear at this point whether these decisions will be reversed or will continue in force. [...]

NVIDIA’s GPP program was surrounded by rumors about priority allocation and MDFs and the way AIBs almost universally decided to drop Radeon cards from their gaming branding indicated that there was more at play than simply a volunteer-based program. Whatever the case may be, it looks like NVIDIA has decided that GPP is not worth the hassle.

NVIDIA's blog post/announcement was an impressively meaningless word salad that tried to spin their looming antitrust problems as a positive, and even managed to shoehorn in their "the way it's meant to be played" tag line. You can click through to WCCFTech's article for the full text of that, and for the numerous other links to further reading that WCCFTech had embedded.

Tom's Hardware has coverage of AMD's response to NIVIDIA's non-apology:

In light of the Nvidia GPP controversy, AMD made an official announcement that it remains committed to fair competition and providing consumer choice. In AMD’s own words, the company’s products don’t come with “gamer taxes” and the company doesn’t force its partners into “anti-competitive conditions.” [...] AMD has now broken its silence on the matter and issued an official statement. Of course, AMD didn’t mention GPP or Nvidia by name, but it’s clear who this statement targets. Corporate VP of Radeon Gaming at AMD Scott Herkelman said the following with regards to the ongoing controversy.

Over the coming weeks, you can expect to see our add-in board partners launch new brands that carry an AMD Radeon product. AMD is pledging to reignite this freedom of choice when gamers choose an AMD Radeon RX graphics card. These brands will share the same values of openness, innovation, and inclusivity that most gamers take to heart. The freedom to tell others in the industry that they won’t be boxed in to choosing proprietary solutions that come bundled with “gamer taxes” just to enjoy great experiences they should rightfully have access to. The freedom to support a brand that actively works to advance the art and science of PC gaming while expanding its reach.

As someone who hates anti-competitive and anti-consumer bullshit of all kinds, just on principle, I have to say that it's good that GPP is dead, and I hope the penalties that NVIDIA pays for even attempting it are correspondingly severe.

Still melting down

Back when Meltdown and Spectre were first making headlines, the word was that Meltdown was more serious but also easier to fix, while Spectre would be haunting us for a long, long time (hence the name). But not only is Meltdown proving more pernicious than first thought, there are more Meltdown-like vulnerabilities in Intel's chips. Yikes.

First, from Bleeping Computer:

Microsoft's patches for the Meltdown vulnerability have had a fatal flaw all these past months, according to Alex Ionescu, a security researcher with cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.

Only patches for Windows 10 versions were affected, the researcher wrote today in a tweet. Microsoft quietly fixed the issue on Windows 10 Redstone 4 (v1803), also known as the April 2018 Update, released on Monday.

Welp, it turns out the #Meltdown patches for Windows 10 had a fatal flaw: calling NtCallEnclave returned back to user space with the full kernel page table directory, completely undermining the mitigation. This is now patched on RS4 but not earlier builds -- no backport?? pic.twitter.com/VIit6hmYK0

— Alex Ionescu (@aionescu) May 2, 2018

Back-ported patches are apparently in the works, but no ETA yet from Microsoft. So, that's the bad news. Ready for the worse news?

From Reuters:

Researchers have found eight new flaws in computer central processing units that resemble the Meltdown and Spectre bugs revealed in January, a German computing magazine reported on Thursday.

The magazine, called c’t, said it was aware of Intel Corp’s plans to patch the flaws, adding that some chips designed by ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan’s Softbank, might be affected, while work was continuing to establish whether Advanced Micro Devices chips were vulnerable.

[...]

C’t did not name its sources because researchers were working under so-called responsible disclosure, in which they inform companies and agree to delay publishing their findings until a patch can be found.

The magazine said Google Project Zero, one of the original collective that exposed Meltdown and Spectre in January, had found one of the flaws and that a 90-day embargo on going public with its findings would end on May 7.

Once again, it's looking like a pretty good day to be a W7-using AMD fan.

Do you remember when WX was supposedly on pace to surpass W7 by November?

NMS's end-of-January numbers are out, and once again, WX has managed modest gains at the expense of Windows XP, while W7 and W8.1 remain mostly unchanged. And, no, WX still hasn't caught up to its nine-year-old rival.

WX gained, of course, from 32.93% to 34.29% (+1.36); W7 ticked down, from 43.08% to 42.39% (-0.69); W8.1 ticked down slightly, from 5.71% to 5.56% (-0.15); and XP slid the most, from 5.18% to 4.05% (-1.13). Except for W8.1's, all of these results are above the ±0.5% "noise threshold," but WX's gains are not enough to encompass the losses of W7, W8.1, and XP. Some of those former Windows users are going elsewhere.

Where are they going, you ask? By the looks of it, Apple. Windows' overall market share slid from 88.51% to 87.79% (-0.72), while MacOS grew its overall market share from 9.02% to 9.95% (+0.93), propelled by MacOS X 10.13 (from 3.53% to 4.46%, +0.93). An overall decline in Windows' user base probably isn't something that Microsoft want to see; yes, WX gained more than a percentage point to start the year, but the fact that those gains are mostly coming at the expense of the 16½ year old XP, rather than the market-leading W7, can't be good news, either.

In a long overdue move, Microsoft might finally tell you what data they're collecting, and let you delete it, in Windows 10

File this one under "It's about fucking time, Microsoft." As reported by TechRadar:

In a move that will certainly please privacy-conscious users, it seems that Microsoft is about to introduce the ability to view and delete the telemetry data that Windows 10 collects, according to new options that have popped up in the operating system’s latest preview builds.

[...]

Last April, after taking what seemed like endless heat on the issue, Microsoft clarified what personal data Windows 10 collects on a basic level (the minimum amount of telemetry data you can elect to send).

But as Ghacks spotted, the most recent preview builds of Windows 10 (released this month and last month) have a pair of new options at the bottom of the Diagnostics & Feedback screen: ‘Diagnostic data viewer’ and ‘Delete diagnostic data’.

At the moment, these are merely placeholders which don’t function or do anything when clicked, but hopefully they will be live for those testing Windows 10 soon enough.

As a result, it’s not clear exactly what their function is at this point, but it seems obvious enough: the former should allow the user to fully view all the diagnostic data being collected on their system, and the latter should facilitate its deletion.

It's important to note that Microsoft haven't announced anything about this themselves, yet, and nobody's seen this feature in action, either, so there's a lot of assumptions in this report. In particular, there's no indication yet whether this functionality would be available to all Windows 10 users, or whether Microsoft might end up restricting it to high-priced SKUs of the OS, as they've previously done with tools like the Group Policy Editor, or the ability to turn off the "Microsoft Consumer Experience."

Still, assuming that Windows 10 Home users get access to these tools, too, it could be a long-overdue addition to the privacy and personal information management tools that the OS should always have included. Honestly, giving users a greater degree of control over Windows 10's telemetry bullshit is the kind of thing that might have convinced me to switch, had they done it back when switching was still a free upgrade.

Now, of course, upgrading will cost extra, which means that I still won't be switching until the time comes to buy a new PC... which won't happen for me until AMD releases new, Spectre-free CPU designs, which is about the only "feature" that I'd really consider switching PCs to obtain (and, no, I'm not even considering switching to Intel). In the meantime, regardless of which version of Windows you're running, you should still be running an anti-telemetry application like SpyBot's Anti-Beacon as well. Don't forget, Microsoft's telemetry bullshit isn't restricted to Windows 10 anymore.

Google to the rescue!

First, Google's Project Zero researchers found the CPU-level security vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre. Now, they've found the cure... or, at least, a more efficient workaround, as reported in The Verge:

Google just gave chipmakers some much needed good news. In a post on the company’s Online Security Blog, two Google engineers described a novel chip-level patch that has been deployed across the company’s entire infrastructure, resulting in only minor declines in performance in most cases. The company has also posted details of the new technique, called ReptOnline, in the hopes that other companies will be able to follow the same technique. If the claims hold, it would mean Intel and others have avoided the catastrophic slowdowns that many had predicted.

“There has been speculation that the deployment of KPTI causes significant performance slowdowns,” the post reads, referring to the company’s “Kernel Page Table Isolation” technique. “Performance can vary, as the impact of the KPTI mitigations depends on the rate of system calls made by an application. On most of our workloads, including our cloud infrastructure, we see negligible impact on performance.”

[...]

That assessment is consistent with early reports from Intel, which had said slowdowns would be “highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant.” Those claims were met with skepticism, with many seeing them as an effort by Intel to downplay the impact of the newly public vulnerabilities. At the same time, some early benchmarks saw slowdowns as high as 17 percent.

More recently, Intel announced it had deployed patches that would render chips immune to the new attacks, and restated that the performance impact was not significant. It’s difficult to confirm Google and Intel’s claims until the patches are deployed, but it’s significant that Google has joined the chipmaker in reporting minimal slowdowns.

As someone who met Intel's early minimal-impact claims with skepticism, I can honestly say to all Core i5 users that I'm glad to learn that the picture is looking less grim than first thought. I'm still glad to be an AMD man, though, and even more glad that Google were awake at the switch for this one. People give Google a lot of grief for sometimes acting like they've forgotten their original mission statement, but this, folks, is what they meant by "don't be evil." Not only were they not evil, they used their powers for good, and are extending help to anyone who needs it, for free.

Intel, meanwhile, is claiming to have finished patches for 90% of their products released in the past five years, which sounds a little weaksauce considering that Meltdown affects Intel products released in the last ten years, much like the firmware issue that was reported a few months ago. And there's also the small matter of Intel, who were notified about Meltdown and Spectre back in June, being led by a CEO who sold off a bunch of stock in October, before either flaw became public knowledge, as reported by MP1st, among others:

Suspiciously, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off $24 million worth of stock late last year before the vulnerabilities became public knowledge. An Intel spokesperson said the stock trade was “unrelated” despite Intel knowing about the issue for five months.

Oops! I predict that the SEC will be investigating that piece of business.

Intel's stock price has, naturally, dropped as a result of all this news, while AMD's has risen, but I suspect that Intel's problems over these problems are only beginning.

UPDATE:

One minor correction: While Jann Horn at Google Project Zero (GOOGL.O) came to similar conclusions independently, it looks like credit for discovering Meltdown actually goes to an independent researcher named Daniel Grus, whose feat of security research is described in this article by The Verge:

The 31-year-old information security researcher and post-doctoral fellow at Austria’s Graz Technical University had just breached the inner sanctum of his computer’s central processing unit (CPU) and stolen secrets from it.

Until that moment, Gruss and colleagues Moritz Lipp and Michael Schwarz had thought such an attack on the processor’s ‘kernel’ memory, which is meant to be inaccessible to users, was only theoretically possible.

“When I saw my private website addresses from Firefox being dumped by the tool I wrote, I was really shocked,” Gruss told Reuters in an email interview, describing how he had unlocked personal data that should be secured.

Gruss, Lipp and Schwarz, working from their homes on a weekend in early December, messaged each other furiously to verify the result.

“We sat for hours in disbelief until we eliminated any possibility that this result was wrong,” said Gruss, whose mind kept racing even after powering down his computer, so he barely caught a wink of sleep.

Gruss and his colleagues had just confirmed the existence of what he regards as “one of the worst CPU bugs ever found”.

Damn, Daniel! (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) Seriously, though, congratulations to Mr. Gruss for some solid detective work.

UPDATE #2:

Cue the lawsuits! As reported by Gizmodo:

It’s been just two days since The Register first reported that all Intel x86-64x processors were subject to a severe security vulnerability, and already Intel has been hit with at least three separate class action lawsuits related to the vulnerability.

The Register first reported the news on January 2nd, noting that the solution to fixing the vulnerability could result in slowdown of the affected computers. Intel has since claimed that any performance penalties would be negligible, and today Google, which has implemented a fix on its affected servers (which host its cloud services, including Gmail) wrote that, “On most of our workloads, including our cloud infrastructure, we see negligible impact on performance.”

Plaintiffs in three different states disagree. As Law.com first noted, a class action complaint was filed January 3rd in United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Since then Gizmodo has found two additional class action complaints filed today (just eleven minutes apart)—one in the District of Oregon and another in the Southern District of Indiana.

All three complaints cite the security vulnerability as well as Intel’s failure to disclose it in a timely fashion.

That's some fast work, and I have a feeling that there are more to come.

Meltdown and Spectre - much less sexy than the James Bond movies they sound like.

Yesterday, The Reg reported that Intel CPUs going back ten years had a fundamental design flaw which compromised the security of users. At the time, it looked like only Intel chips were affected, but Intel has been quick to claim that AMD and ARM chips have the flaw, too.

Here's the thing about that, funny story.. it's actually not true. Not Pants On Fire, mind you, but still Mostly False, or at best Half True, according to this report from Gizmodo:

Originally, the Register reported, only Intel processors (which dominate the U.S. market) were believed to be subject to the flaw. But it’s become clear that a wide range of processor types could be affected, with Google writing that AMD, ARM, and other devices were also vulnerable—though only partially and with less performance impact following a fix than Intel-based devices.

In a statement to Gizmodo, AMD said that of the three attack variants, one was easily resolved with “negligible performance impact,” while the others have “near zero risk” or “zero risk” due to “architecture differences.”

ARM told Gizmodo that it has been working “together with Intel and AMD to address a side-channel analysis method which exploits speculative execution techniques used in certain high-end processors, including some of our Cortex-A processors. This is not an architectural flaw; this method only works if a certain type of malicious code is already running on a device and could at worst result in small pieces of data being accessed from privileged memory.”

I don't believe Intel's spin on this one; there is currently no evidence that AMD and ARM have anywhere near the same kind of fundamental design issues that Intel have with this, and users of AMD and ARM products will not see the same kind of slowdown post-patch as Core i5 users. Sure, AMD (and ARM) are also engaged in a little PR over this development, but right now, I'm inclined to trust them a lot more than I trust Intel, for whom this is the second such wide-reaching security problem that comes built right in to their Core i5 product line. 

Right now, it looks like AMD and ARM are acting from an abundance of caution, here (better safe than sorry, right?), and not trying to "work the refs" in advance of the inevitable flood of class action lawsuits by which Intel will shortly be besieged. So, yeah... I'm still glad to be an AMD man, at least for one more day.

Did I ever mention how glad I am to be an AMD man?

Because right now, I really, really am, thanks to stories like this one, from The Reg:

A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – such as PCID – to reduce the performance hit. Your milage may vary.

Similar operating systems, such as Apple's 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can't address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.

[Emphasis added.]

Yikes.

With a 5% slowdown as the best case, and 30% as the worst, I'm thinking that the modest performance hit that I took by getting an AMD FX-6300 at half the price of an Intel Core i5 is looking like a better and better deal all the time.

Details of the exact nature of this new flaw are naturally embargoed, given that it's a hardware-level security issue affecting everyone who bought an Intel CPU in the last decade, although The Reg's report includes those details of the flaw that have surfaced, if you're interested in what details are available. The fact that this is being described as a "fundamental design flaw," though, the second such flaw to surface in the last few months, seems especially egregious. Intel had been beating AMD in performance benchmarks for years, but it now seems like they were cutting some serious corners along the way.

Cue the class action lawsuits in five.... four... three...

Q: How unpopular is Windows 8?

A: So unpopular that AMD won't support it with Radeon driver updates anymore.

From The Guru of 3D:

Yesterday AMD released their Radeon Crimson ReLive Edition Driver v17.7.2 (download), and some of you have asked me if I know where the Windows 8.1 drivers are. That indeed is a fair question, as they are missing.

Earlier on Windows 8.1 32-bit support was already halted, and we as well noticed that there has not been a 8.1 64-bit driver available ever since yesterday either. I just asked AMD to see what is going on there, and it is confirmed that there will no longer be any new Windows 8.1 drivers for Radeon graphics cards. The install base is just too small, and yes you should be moving onwards to Windows 10. Obviously previous driver releases are still available (we have them mirrored here). Here is what we got back from AMD:

"We no longer support Windows 8.1 officially with consumer postings. If users want to use the Windows 7 driver on Windows 8.1 then that is their choice."

That's right: Windows 7 (released in 2009) still has a sufficiently healthy install base, and will keep getting Radeon driver updates for the foreseeable future, but Windows 8.1 (released in 2013) will not. And Windows 8.1 was the "popular" version of Windows 8. That, ladies and germs, is a flop.

On the plus side, AMD's Radeon GPUs were not nearly as popular with gamers during the Windows 8.1 years and NVidia's GeForce series, so there probably aren't too many people affected by this. Whether those users move "onwards" to Windows 10, or roll back to Windows 7 (still supported by AMD, because still popular), will be interesting to see.

Users fix Windows 7 & 8.1 updates again, after Microsoft deliberately breaks them [UPDATED!]

In the absence of TRON, it seems the users can, and will, fight for themselves.

From BleepingComputer:

GitHub user Zeffy has created a patch that removes a limitation that Microsoft imposed on users of 7th generation processors, a limit that prevents users from receiving Windows updates if they still use Windows 7 and 8.1.

This limitation was delivered through Windows Update KB4012218 (March 2017 Patch Tuesday) and has made many owners of Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Bristol Ridge CPUs very angry last week, as they weren't able to install any Windows updates.

[...] When the April 2017 Patch Tuesday came around last week, GitHub user Zeffy finally had the chance to test four batch scripts he created in March, after the release of KB4012218.

His scripts worked as intended by patching Windows DLL files, skipping the CPU version check, and delivering updates to Windows 7 and 8.1 computers running 7th generation CPUs.

Huzzah! Now users of PCs with 7th generation processors can run whatever software they fucking well please on them, which is as it should be. Microsoft does not have the right to tell you how you'll use the PCs that you own, and the fact that they've now failed to do so gives me feelings of satisfaction.

My hat is off to you, Zeffy! Today, you are a hero.

UPDATE!

It looks like this development is starting to gain some more much-deserved attention, like this piece from ExtremeTech:

It should be hard for Microsoft to make any more mistakes with its Windows 10 push, but it keeps finding new ways. After nagging everyone incessantly about upgrading, updating computers without asking, and making Windows 10 patches mandatory, Microsoft has started disallowing Windows 7 and 8.1 updates on machines running the latest hardware. One developer has had enough, and is releasing a patch to help users get around this artificial blockade.

The unofficial patch from a developer calling him or herself ‘Zeffy’ on GitHub targets those running very new CPUs on older versions of Windows. Windows 7 and 8 are still supported with updates, but Microsoft has started blocking non-security updates for systems that run Intel 7th-Generation Kaby Lake processors, AMD “Bristol Ridge” Rizen chips, or the Qualcomm 8996 (Snapdragon 820 and 821) SoC.

[...] The Zeffy patch goes after a change Microsoft introduced in March that identifies the system’s CPU. As the changelog explained at the time, the patch “Enabled detection of processor generation and hardware support when PC tries to scan or download updates through Windows Update.” Zeffy is very clear on his dislike for Windows 10 when he calls this “essentially a giant middle finger to anyone who dare not ‘upgrade’ to the steaming pile of garbage known as Windows 10.”

Well said, Zeffy. Well said.

Windows 7 & 8 now blocking older AMD processors, too, not just Ryzen.

Are we really surprised?

From InfoWorld:

I reported earlier this morning that we're seeing "Unsupported hardware" and "Windows could not search for new updates" messages from people who are running Windows 7 and 8.1 on Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Rizen-based computers. It's part of Microsoft's long-threatened ban on Win7 and 8.1 updates for newer seventh-generation processors.

Now there's a report of similar blockages on an older AMD A6-8570 processor. It isn't clear if there's a bug in the detection logic, or if Microsoft's going to block Win7 and 8.1 updates on some older sixth-generation processors.

The report comes from poster The Heretic on [H]ardForum:

Well it isn't just the Ryzen that's going to get whacked. I came into work this AM to look at one of the system's I'd re-imaged with Win7 Pro and started downloading updates to it as I left yesterday. I was greeted with Microsoft's gotcha.

The screen he posts clearly says the block took place on an AMD Pro A6-8570 system.

[...]

AMD's product page for the AMD Pro A6-8570 clearly states that this is an older, sixth-generation chip.

I know that one should always hesitate to ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence, but when you consider just how much anti-consumer bullshit Microsoft has pulled in their efforts to force Windows 7 & 8 users to switch to Windows 10, I honestly think that we can just assume that this is deliberate on Microsoft's part. AMD really did a deal with the devil, when they agreed to let Microsoft lock their silicon to the products of Microsoft's choosing, and they should really be rethinking that decision, if they're not already.

Microsoft's coercion yields predictable response.

It looks like Microsoft's move to block Windows 7 and 8 users from running software they paid for, on the hardware of their choosing, is reaping a predictable harvest of bad PR.

First, Forbes:

Microsoft Admits Forcing More Users Onto Windows 10

Microsoft is blocking Windows 7 and 8 updates on Intel's seventh generation Core i3, i5 and i7 (Kaby Lake), AMD's Ryzen (Bristol Ridge) and Qualcomm's 8996 processors. Devices powered by these processors must update to Windows 10 in order to receive updates from Microsoft.

[...]

Responding to a request on the subject, a spokesperson said "As new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support. This enables us to focus on deep integration between Windows and the silicon while maintaining maximum reliability and compatibility with previous generations of platform and silicon".

[...]

However, there is something going on here I don't like. While it's certainly true that Microsoft will optimise Windows 10 continually, it doesn't need to pull support for Windows Updates on new processors. It is still, however it's spun, trying to get a greater number of people off Windows 7 and 8 and onto Windows 10. I understand the business objective, I'm just not fond of being held hostage over updates.

What's more, the wording is clear that this will be an ongoing thing. Of course Microsoft pledged that it would put an end big numeric updates to Windows. There will be, it says, no Windows 11. But instead users will be updated to new versions of what I expect will become simply "Windows" in the future. But what that does also mean is that if there are additional things added to Windows that you dislike, you won't have any option to use an old version of Windows instead. While there will be user benefits to this strategy, it also means that Microsoft is taking away a measure of control from users.

[...]

So I get where Microsoft is going with this. For many, Windows 10 will be their OS of choice anyway. But for others the whole thing will leave a new sour taste in their mouths. You can read the company's justification in detail on its Windows Experience blog.

So, it's not a bug: this is the intended result of changes that Microsoft is making to Windows 7 & 8. And Forbes is a big enough platform that others are picking this up and running with it, with Gizmodo, Express.co.uk, Financial Express, and Business Standard all reporting the story, and not positively.

Express.co.uk wins the most lurid headline award:

Windows 10 shock - users rage as Microsoft blocks THIS popular software

MICROSOFT criticised for stopping users running preferred software on new Windows PCs.

While Gizmodo offered perhaps the most practical take, with a possible workaround for Microsoft's latest BS:

It's not outside the realms of possibility that someone will cook up a workaround, if you want to persist with a pre-Windows 10 platform. If you can't wait, it should be possible to use a program such as WSUS to grab updates manually.

But it's coverage in the likes of Forbes, Financial Express, and Business Standard that could prove the most problematic for Microsoft, because those are publications that Microsoft's highly-sought-after Enterprise customers could be reading, and paying heed to. Microsoft are already having trouble convincing these customers to adopt Windows 10, and this latest bit of flat-out coercion is unlikely to help. Darth Microsoft altering the deal yet again isn't a good look, when you're trying to convince prospective customers to enter into a long-time deal with them.

Hats off to Microsoft! They started the week by winning some good PR for not-really fixing Windows 10 Updates, and ended it by proving Tim Sweeney right, actually breaking Windows 7 in order for force users to make the OS switch that they're clearly not intending to make, anytime soon. They started by looking like they actually were listening to their customers, and ended up looking rather cartoonishly villainous. Well done, Redmond! GG.

UPDATE:

Like a bad rash, the bad PR continues to spread, including this piece on Hot Hardware:

Microsoft Apparently Ramping Up Heavy-Handed Tactics To Force Windows 10 Migrations

The clock is ticking for users holding out on Windows 7 and 8. For starters, Microsoft is blocking Windows 7 and 8 updates for Intel's seventh generation Core i3, i5 and i7 (Kaby Lake), AMD's Ryzen (Bristol Ridge) and Qualcomm's 8996 processors. The low-level Vulkan API will also not be supporting multiple GPUs on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and users will need to update to Windows 10 in order to support SLI or CrossFire with Vulkan.

Microsoft’s main argument is that this lack of updates will help them to focus on the deep integration between Windows and new silicon generations. Windows 7 was designed nearly a decade ago before the introduction of x86/x64 SOCs. Windows 7 is unable to run on any modern silicon without device drivers and firmware emulating Windows 7’s expectations for interrupt processing, bus support, and power states. According to Microsoft, “redesigning Windows 7 subsystems to embrace new generations of silicon would introduce churn into the Windows 7 code base” and break the company's commitment to security and stability.

This is the first time I've seen anyone connect the Ryzen/Kaby Lake story with the Vulkan story, but it's an obvious connection. As I blogged before, once Microsoft start blocking updates depending on your installed hardware, there's nothing stopping them from doing it for any installed hardware. It would go a long way to explaining why the Kronos Group isn't enabling full functionality for Vulkan on Windows 7 & 8, too -- they may not be able to, if Microsoft is breaking the earlier OS in a bid to force migration to Windows 10.

Darth Microsoft alters the deal again

A while back, AMD and Intel made waves when they both annouced that their latest CPU chipsets (Zen and Kaby Lake, respectively) would only receive driver support for Windows 10. At the time, the speculation was that this "official" Win10 exclusivity wouldn't actually matter much, since both chipsets would probably run just fine on Windows 7 or 8.1, anway, and nobody was apparently willing to give much credence to the idea that AMD and Intel would just write off a huge chunk of their potential customer base by actively preventing users of older Windows versions from using their new chips.

People who were thinking that way, however, apparently didn't reckon with Microsoft, or with the amount of anti-consumer bullshit that Microsoft would be willing to build into its products. Because they're now actively blocking users of Windows 7 and 8.1 from using older versions of Windows on new Ryzen and Kaby Lake machines.

From PCGamesN:

It’s only frickin’ March. I find it hard to believe we haven’t even had three months of 2017 yet we’ve already seen entirely new CPU platforms from both AMD and Intel as well as a new ‘fastest graphics card ever.’ But as they announced over a year ago, Microsoft aren’t supporting the latest CPU platforms on their last-gen operating systems, suggesting anyone who wants to keep their PCs all nice and OCD updated should immediately upgrade to Windows 10.

Now that wouldn’t be a massive issue, as older operating systems were obviously not built with the intricacies of whole new chipset and CPU platforms in mind and it’s arguably more important for Microsoft to focus on ensuring good support for them with their most current OS.

All well and good. Except for the fact that reportedly AMD’s Ryzen chips seem to actually perform better on Windows 7 compared with Windows 10.

[...]

Yeah, that’s a mite awkward. But it’s okay ‘cos AMD says everything is fine, move along, nothing to see here. Windows 10 definitely isn’t having any scheduler issues with the Ryzen CCX architecture and any performance differences between the two operating systems “can be more likely attributed to software architecture differences between these OSes.”

Tom's Hardware gives more detail:

Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users with new processors who try to scan or download updates via the Windows Update tool are greeted with one of two messages. The first is straightforward: "Unsupported Hardware [...] Your PC uses a processor that isn’t supported on this version of Windows and you won’t receive updates." The second message isn't quite as clear:

Windows could not search for new updatesAn error occurred while checking for new updates for your computer.Error(s) found:Code 80240037 Windows Update encountered an unknown error.

So the company published a support article to explain that the way its new support policy was implemented means that "Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 devices that have a seventh generation or a later generation processor may no longer be able to scan or download updates through Windows Update or Microsoft Update." The company (naturally) advised users affected by this problem to upgrade from their current operating system to Windows 10.

If you planned to upgrade to Kaby Lake, AMD's Ryzen, or another new processor, then you'll also finally have to move to Windows 10. This might have been implied by Microsoft's previous statements--it has repeatedly said that Windows 10 would be the only operating system to support the new processors--but now it's clear that some people didn't get the message (hence the support article) and that "will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support" really means "you won't even be able to search for updates if you buy a new CPU without moving to Windows 10."

At this point, I just want to emphasize that this new behaviour isn't being added to Windows 10. It's being added to Windows 7 and 8, products whose users bought and paid for the software, and who never agreed to only run the OS on hardware that was approved by Microsoft.

The deal was always simple -- you owned your PC, and could install any hardware in your PC that you liked, as long as you understood that your installed hardware might not all play nicely together, either with your other hardware or with Windows itself. Once again, however, Microsoft have altered the deal, and Windows 7 and 8 users can now only run hardware that Microsoft approves in advance.

Here's a thought: if they can do this with your CPU and motherboard, then what's stopping them from doing this with your GPU, too? Want a better graphics card? Better switch to Windows 10! Any kind of hardware that Windows 7/8 can detect, which is all of it, can now cause you to simply be blocked from future updates of your supposedly-supported-until-2020 operating system, purely by Microsoft's fiat.

That, my friends, is bullshit. It shouldn't be at all surprising, of course, at least to anyone who's been watching Microsoft's behaviour over the last couple of years, but it's still bullshit. That point should not be in question.

The only real question is, "Will it work?"

So far, benchmark comparisons between Intel's new Kaby Lake processors and their older Skylake ships have shown almost identical performance between the two. Some heavily hyper-threaded applications showed significant gains, so if you're a professional videographer or YouTuber who renders hours of video as a business, Kaby Lake might be worth your while, but for all other applications, including games, you may as well stick with the PC you're already using, unless it's older than SkyLake.

AMD's Ryzen benchmarks, by comparison, have been such a hot mess that AMD had to issue disclaimers, asserting that their chips ran just fine with Windows 10, really, and weren't running unusually hot, either, regardless of what your PC's onboard temperature sensors were saying. And while Ryzen benchmarks for some heavily-hyperthreaded applications looked great, most of the benchmarks that gamers and other PC power enthusiasts really care about showed no better performance than Intel's.

This is what the end of Moore's Law looks like. PC performance seems to have plateaued, with brand-new PCs quite simply not being much of an upgrade over chipsets that are years old.

If your PC is pre-dates the Obama administration, and you're needing to upgrade because everything runs terribly, and you're wanting to stay with Windows 7 or 8.1, then you have a tough choice to make. You can buy last-gen tech and get an inexpensive system that will work perfectly well for at least a few years, but which may need replacing again in a few years' time... or you can switch to Windows 10, which you've been avoiding for a number of excellent reasons, in order to get more future-proofing, and just hope and pray that Microsoft eventually pull their heads out of their collective asses. Good luck with that.

If, however, you bought a decently powerful PC relatively recently, then you're probably good. You can stick with what's working, rather than spending money on a new PC that you don't actually need, that won't perform much better than what you're already running, and that you'll have to switch to Windows 10 to use, even though everything about Microsoft's Windows 10 strategy turns you completely off.

"Will it work?" The answer depends on how many Windows 7 and 8.1 users are genuinely happy with their machines, and the extent to which they're determined to avoid Windows 10's bullshit. Given that (a) PC sales have been trending downwards for eight years, while Android has overtaken Windows as the most-used OS on Earth thanks to its utter dominance on mobile devices, and (b) Windows 7 users, in particular have shown no desire whatsoever to switch to Windows 10, I somehow doubt that this will drive Windows 10 adoption. It could, and probably will, hurt sales of Ryzen and Kaby Lake, which makes AMD's and Intel's collusion in this scheme all the more baffling, but I don't see this actually benefitting Microsoft much at all.

So, will it work? I don't think so. In fact, I'm going to stand behind my earlier prediction, and say that Windows 10's market share will continue to tick backwards next month, both in general and among Steam users, while sales of new PCs continue to decline as Microsoft's latest anti-consumer step further depresses demand for new silicon.

Place your bets!

Nothing to see here, says AMD

I guess Microsoft and AMD have kissed and made up, because AMD is letting them off the hook for the problems that Ryzen has with Windows 10.

From TechSpot:

AMD has put an official end to the debate surrounding Windows 10's thread scheduler and Ryzen's lower-than-expected 1080p gaming performance. In an official statement posted on the AMD gaming blog, the company says "the Windows® 10 thread scheduler is operating properly for “Zen.”"

The statement continues to say AMD "do not presently believe there is an issue with the scheduler adversely utilizing the logical and physical configurations of the architecture."

As for reported performance deltas between Windows 10 and Windows 7, AMD says that they "do not believe there is an issue with scheduling differences between the two versions of Windows", and that any performance differences are simply attributed to the software architecture differences between 7 and 10.

Problems? What problems?

AMD went on to say that their new SMT technology should have a neutral or positive impact on performance (never mind all those benchmarks to the contrary), and finishes by saying that "some game optimizations for Ryzen may be possible." So, there are no problems, therefore any problems you're seering are strictly your imagination, and they'll be helping patch the non-existent performance problems on a game-by-game basis.... eventually.

Why is this AMD's best option, exactly? Ryzen benchmarks really are something of a hot mess right now, and this latest statement from AMD is basically an admission that their new hotness CPU just doesn't run as well as they were claiming prior to its launch. That's right in line with the Intel's comparative benchmarks, which show only modest gains for Kaby Lake over SkyLake, but considering how much AMD have sunk into development the new Zen architecture, if it's not going to be able to outperform Intel's Kaby Lake, that might spell serious trouble for AMD.

AMD does mention, almost in passing, that Ryzen performs equally well on both Windows 7 and Windows 10, but considering their previous, full-throated endorsement of Windows 10 as the only platform that will see full driver support for Ryzen and all other future AMD products, I don't think that's going to be enough to pull in the Windows 7 die-hards that they're losing by not outright committing to supporting Windows 7 until at least 2020. If this was meant to be some sort of dog-whistle appeal to Windows 7 AMD enthusiasts, I think it's much to quiet for any of those old dogs to really hear, and pitched outside the range of their hearing, anyway.

AMD's previous CPUs were at a significant performance disadvantage compared to Intel's i5, so the fact that Ryzen is on par with i7 is still a significant performance improvement over older AMD processors. AMD's bang-for-buck proposition hasn't changed, either, which has already prompted Intel to cut prices significantly on their line -- competition is generally good for consumers, and anyone buying a new PC can now basically pick the affordably-priced, high-powered CPU of their choice. But PC sales are still down, and neither new CPU is showing enough of a performance boost in independent testing to justify the expense of a new system. So, how does AMD benefit from taking the hit for this?

"Our new CPU really just isn't that great" certainly doesn't help sell Ryzen, and since i7/Kaby Lake isn't really a big step up from i5/Skylake, either, it doesn't look like either new CPU line is likely to boost PC sales anytime soon... which means there's nothing driving new Windows 10 installations for Microsoft, either. I guess Microsoft get the driver issue to stop being comment-worthy, but that doesn't seem like much of a benefit. Who wins here?

AMD's new Ryzen CPU only supports Windows 10, is negatively affected by Windows 10.

This is why you don't want to tie your brand-new, best-in-class CPU to Microsoft's bug factory.

From Wccftech:

A newly discovered bug in Windows 10’s scheduler has been found to be negatively affecting performance of AMD Ryzen CPUs. The bug has been confirmed to affect all Windows 10 versions but not Windows 7. It’s not clear yet if Windows 8.1 is affected.

Ryzen processors are AMD’s first ever to feature simulatenous multi-threading technology. [...] Intel’s hyper-threading technology works in a very similar fashion. [...] In best case scenarios SMT provides about 20-30% of additional throughput give or take in both Intel’s latest Skylake microarchitecture and AMD’s Zen microarchitecture.

Windows 10′s scheduler correctly identifies Intel’s hyper-threads as lesser performing than principal core threads and schedules tasks in a way that’s takes advantage of the additional throughput without negatively impacting performance. Unfortunately the scheduler currently is not able to differentiate principal core threads from virtual SMT threads with Ryzen and in fact sees 16 thread Ryzen 7 processors as processors with 16 physical cores with equal resources per thread.

Because it does not give any preferential prioritization of scheduling tasks to primary threads over SMT threads like it does on Intel platforms, a massively larger percentage of tasks can and do end up getting scheduled for a virtual SMT thread rather than a principal core thread. Resulting in significant artificial performance degradation.

First things first, we’ve been informed that AMD has become aware of the issue. I’m sure they must’ve had some stern words for Microsoft over this mishap. The company has been pushing hardware manufacturers to adopt its brand newest OS for years. So it must’ve left a bitter taste in AMD’s mouth after embracing Microsoft’s Windows 10 push for it to be rewarded with poor hardware support. With that being said, it’s safe to assume the pair are actively working together to get this issue resolved.

Again, this is a bug that only affects Ryzen PCs running Windows 10... which is all of them, because AMD is only supporting Ryzen for Windows 10. I wonder if they're re-thinking that wisdom of that decision, yet? Especially since Ryzen benchmark scores were puzzlingly low, something that AMD were having trouble explaining. Well, here's the explanation: Microsoft royally fucked them over, and AMD should be planning legal action. At the very least, AMD should be looking to get out of that Windows 10 exclusivity side-deal, now that Microsoft's incompetence has resulted in wave of coverage like "Gaming benchmarks on Ryzen are a critical mess," and "Gaming isn't a strong point for AMD's fledgling architecture."

GG, Microsoft. GG.

Is this LTSB carve-out by Microsoft meant to boost sales of CPUs?

A few months ago, the news broke that AMD's and Intel's new chips (Ryzen and Kaby Lake, respectively) would only officially support Windows 10. The move was clearly the product of some sort of side-dealing with Microsoft; with Windows 7 still nearly twice as popular as Microsoft's newest OS, limiting support in this way effectively undercuts sales of newer-model CPUs, something which wouldn't be in AMD's or Intel's interests at all unless Microsoft had made some other concession elsewhere.

Well, we may have just found out what that concession was.

From Gregg Keizer at Computerworld:

Microsoft has largely invalidated one of Windows 10's signature concessions to corporate customers, said Gartner analysts who recommended that enterprises reconsider running the operating system's most stable and static edition.

"Microsoft has clarified support plans for LTSB, highlighting restrictions and caveats that could make this an unviable strategy," wrote Stephen Kleynhans and Michael Silver in a Gartner research note to clients earlier this month.

[...]

The most far-reaching change was quietly revealed as the 22nd item in a long FAQ on Windows support. "Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Branches, also known as LTSBs, will support the currently released silicon at the time of release of the LTSB," the new policy stated [emphasis added]. "As future silicon generations are released, support will be created through future Windows 10 LTSB releases that customers can deploy for those systems."

The tying of support to the latest silicon -- to the current generation of processors and associated chipsets from the likes of Intel and AMD -- was broadly communicated by Microsoft in January 2016, and revised in March. However, most of the attention paid to the unprecedented change was about how it affected those running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on newer PCs. Even though Microsoft also said at the time that "all future silicon releases will require the latest release of Windows 10," there was no clear call-out that the same rule applied to LTSB.

But it did, and does. And there's the rub.

To me, this stinks of quid pro quo. Microsoft clearly wanted AMD and Intel to limit support for new CPUs to Windows 10, thus pushing the market in a Win10 direction to which it clearly wasn't inclined to move naturally; AMD and Intel clearly wanted to be compensated for passing on 48% of the PC market by doing so. And thus, we have this change to the Long-Term Service Branch of Windows, which only existed in the first place "because of corporate customer resistance to the accelerated tempo of added features, changed code and altered UI in Windows 10."

The other effect of this side-deal between AMD, Intel, and Microsoft, is to undercut the appeal of Windows 10 to Enterprise customers. The allure of LTSB was that Enterprise customers' IT departments wouldn't have to spent nearly as much time dealing with upgrades as Microsoft phased out earlier Windows 10 versions in favour of newer ones. That's not the case, anymore:

"Many I&O [Infrastructure & Operations] leaders expected to pick a single LTSB release that they would deploy and run for up to 10 years on all their organizations' PCs, old and new," Kleynhans and Silver said in their report.

"With Microsoft's latest guidance on LTSB, this is not possible."The problem, they explained, is that in the face of essentially annual silicon upgrades by Intel, enterprises would have to ditch the idea of sticking with a single LTSB build for, say, five years. Instead, they could be required to adopt virtually every LTSB version as they buy new PCs powered by new generations of silicon.

It seems to me that this carve-out side-deal undercuts both Windows 10 Enterprise adoption, and the sales of new PCs. Why switch to Windows 10 now when it means more upgrading going forward; why not just stay with what you're already using for another couple of years? Also, why buy new PCs, if your existing software won't be fully supported on them; why not just stick with the hardware you're already using, which is probably still perfectly fine?

Coming at a time when new PC sales have been in decline for years, making new PCs look even less attractive because of the extra Win10 IT support costs that will come with them seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly. For organizations that use a large number of PCs of varying ages, the fact that Windows 10 now requires frequent hardware and software updates (because otherwise you'll have multiple different Windows 10 versions running on the same corporate network) would seem to create something of a barrier to entry.

If this was the price for AMD and Intel to preferentially support Windows 10 over the (much more popular) Windows 7, as I suspect, then it looks to have been both short-sighted and self-defeating, meaning fewer sales of new PCs and slower adoption of Windows 10. It's as if some MS executive had "get AMD & Intel on-board" as one of their key results, and didn't really care what the consequences were of doing the deal that made it happen.

I suppose it isn't particularly surprising that Microsoft appears to have basically bribed both AMD and Intel into tying all of their new product releases to one specific version of Windows. I'm just surprised that AMD and Intel sold out so cheaply; it seems like they're giving up far more than they're getting back.

Intel adds support for Vulkan graphics API on Windows

I've blogged about Vulkan before. An open-source, cross-platform Application Program Interface, or API, it had all the advantages of its predecessor, OpenGL, with the same low-level power that Windows 10-exclusive DirectX® 12 offers, was receiving strong support from AMD and Valve, and was already being baked into Unreal Engine 4, which Nintendo is recently promoting as the tool for Switch third party development. There really was only one thing holding it back: a lack of support from Intel, who arguably make the best-performing CPUs for PC gaming.

That's now changed.

From WindowsCentral:

Intel has officially added support (via CIO) for the Vulkan™ graphics API for its most recent Core chips on Windows 10. While Vulkan is already supported on graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, the integrated graphics in Intel's Kaby Lake and Skylake chips can now run games and applications written with the API as well.

[...] Here's how Intel describes Vulkan in its documentation:

Vulkan* targets high performing real-time 3D graphics applications, like games, while giving low-overhead hardware control over GPU acceleration to developers. Vulkan* utilizes many open-source libraries and utilities, and promises great performance and predictability, while paving the way to better equip games to handle virtual reality or 4k HDR.

Vulkan support was previously available on Intel chips in beta form, but the official release signals that support is ready for primetime and should be relatively stable. Don't expect your integrated graphics to suddenly compete with high-end cards from NVIDIA and AMD, but Vulkan support should offer some solid performance on modest settings for games that support it. Perhaps more intriguing are the possibilities this opens up for Vulkan-coded apps that could run on the low-cost Windows Holographic VR headsets coming from Microsoft's hardware partners later this year.

Vulkan is a direct competitor for DirectX 12, and should be stiff competition: it's available on Windows 7, which DX12 isn't, and also on Nintendo's Switch, Sony's PS4, and on Android and iOS devices which don't run Windows 10, either. With Intel officially supporting the API, it may have just received the additional push it needs to become the API for the current generation of gaming graphics engines. Everyone is on board with Vulkan... much to the chagrin of Microsoft, who have long been used to DirectX being the de facto standard for gaming.

Not only does this loosen Windows 10's grip on gaming, it might even loosen Windows' grip on gaming, generally, allowing more games to be developed more easily for Linux and MacOS, both of which are Unix-like environments (as is PS4's Orbis). We might even see a renewed push for SteamOS (also a Unix-like OS) from Valve. And it could ensure that Microsoft continue to be shut out of the mobile market, leaving mobile game developers, in particular, no reason at all to develop for engines that rely on Microsoft's proprietary API. Why would they, when an open-source, easily-portable alternative is available?

In fact, the only part of this development that holds zero interest for me is the potential effect on Windows 10-branded VR headset development, simply because I'm not convinced that PSVR headsets are going to perform any better in the market than existing offerings from Oculus and HTC. As a PC gamer, I'd love to have a choice of platforms available beyond the choice of Windows versions; if Vulkan really takes off, that could actually happen, in exactly the way that it's refused to happen until now.

Stay tuned...

This is what the end of Moore's Law looks like

From Mark Walton at arstechnica:

Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?

With identical performance to Skylake, Intel brings desktop performance to a standstill.

The Intel Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying. The i7-7700K is the first desktop Intel chip in brave new post-"tick-tock" world—which means that instead of major improvements to architecture, process, and instructions per clock (IPC), we get slightly higher clock speeds and a way to decode DRM-laden 4K streaming video. Huzzah.

For the average consumer building or buying a new performance-focused PC, a desktop chip based on 14nm Kaby Lake remains the chip of choice—a total lack of competition at this level makes sure of that.

But for the enthusiast—where the latest and greatest should perform better than what came before—Kaby Lake desktop chips are a disappointment, a stopgap solution that does little more than give OEMs something new to stick on a label in a 2017 product stack.

Walton's article goes into more detail, of course, and is worth a read if you're looking to replace your current PC for some reason, but the big takeaway is something that I've been saying for a while now: if your current PC is still working, then there's no rush to replace it, because even the next generation of CPUs (and GPUs, for that matter) offer very little in the way of a performance boost. AMD's Zen/Ryzen chips are still coming, of course, but are unlikely to offer much more than parity with Kaby Lake.

Intel, in particular, has been talking a big game about vertical processor design, but nobody knows what that means yet, and nobody's working on building actual-3D chips, even in the lab, let alone something that will scale up for mass production; right now, 3-D chips are just stacks of 2-D chips, which adds processor cores but doesn't do much for your processing power... especially since the software probably isn't even utilizing all the cores you have on your PC already.

This is something that PC gamers, in particular, may take a while to figure out, something which is helping boost Windows 10's share of Steam users (gamers are the only ones still buying new PCs out of habit, rather than necessity), but the simple truth is that the gaming PC you bought a few years ago will probably do you for a few years yet, unless you're looking to get into streaming in a big way, or VR. The days of needing to buy a new PC every couple of years just to stay in the game... they're well and truly done.

Incidentally, this probably bodes well for Nintendo Switch, which is using last-generation Intel chips. While Switch will still be significantly less powerful than either PS4 or XBOne, let alone a PC, it's not going to be significantly less powerful than it could have been, had Nintendo used the newer Pascal chips, and it won't fall farther behind any time soon, either.