Want a Ryzen CPU? Then forget about Windows 7

AMD has come out and confirmed that its next-gen Ryzen processors, due to emerge at the start of next month, will not be formally supported for Windows 7.

Last year, the company had said that Ryzen wouldn’t support the older OS, but as computer World points out, a recent report put the rumour out there that AMD had modified its mind, and would issue drivers for Windows 7 after all.

Perhaps this was more believable as a result of a hell of a lot is riding on Ryzen creating an impression and being successful for AMD, so such a turnaround would be another way of obtaining one over on Intel once it involves the plentiful number of users still running Windows 7. (Intel, of course, has already turned its back on Windows 7 with Kaby Lake CPUs).

But this was simply raring thinking, and although AMD says it has tested Ryzen on Windows 7, there won’t be any official support or drivers for the new processors.

Unknown quantities

So if you upgrade a Windows 7 system to a Ryzen C.P.U., the chip might work okay on the face of it, but there are no guarantees you’ll get the complete performance levels or set of options that the processors can provide on Windows ten. And indeed, you might encounter stability problems.

In short, it’ll be a pretty uncertain endeavour to run this software and hardware combination.

Last August, Microsoft confirmed that only Windows 10 would support Intel’s Kaby Lake and AMD’s Zen (Ryzen) processors, and as we mentioned before, at the time, AMD stated that its processor roadmap was "fully aligned with Microsoft's code strategy". And it remains fully aligned, much to the chagrin of Windows 7 diehards, no doubt.