If you’ve yet to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft would like you to know that in 18 months time, the company will no longer be providing processor support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users.
Come July 18, 2017, Microsoft will only be providing support for Skylake processors on a select few approved devices, the list of which can be found here. For all other computers running older version of Windows, Microsoft has stated that they will only provide the “most critical” security fixes and only if they don’t “risk the reliability or compatibility” of Windows 7 and 8.1 on other (non-Skylake) systems.
Skylake processors aren’t the only one affected as other next generations processors, such as Intel’s “Kaby Lake”, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 and AMD’s “Bristol Ridge” APUs will not be receiving support on older Windows version. Going forward, the company says that using the latest generation processors will always require the latest generation operating system. In essence, when Microsoft decides to release Windows 11 in the future, processor support for Windows 10 will gradually be discontinued, much like what is currently happening.
Source : Ars Technica, PCWorld