Recently there was an uproar over Microsoft’s decision to not allow owners of 1st gen Ryzens install Windows 11. In reaction, MS promised to reconsider. They looked at 1st gen Ryzen and 7th gen Intel processors, and indeed allowed some 7th gen Intel processors. But they still refused to allow people running 1st gen Ryzens to upgrade to Windows 11.
There was some mention of a “52% greater number of kernel mode crashes.” They then mentioned that more recent CPUs have 99.8% stability rate.
So…a 99.6% stability rate is horrible? Is there something I’m missing? What critical flaw exists in older Ryzen CPUs that Microsoft thinks is so detrimental to the user experience?
Undoubtedly there will be ways around this, but this still seems like a pretty stupid decision. Why make it harder for people to throw money at you?
If I understood correctly, installing W11 on zen1 wont be a problem. Microsoft discourages it, but a fresh install will work just fine. What they won’t allow are upgrades from Windows 10 to Windows 11 if you have zen1. I don’t really see a problem with that. The average Windows install gets bloated and broken around 6 months after install, so might as well freshly install 11. Its not like anyone capable of installing an os will willingly perform such an upgrade if it can be avoided. Who knows what important stuff will break in the background.
This will mostly affect businesses.
already gave up on windows, 10 started great and became nothing but a PITA with constant forced updates, bugs, data being over written, OS level spyware, advertising in menus, and im sure more I cant remember now.
Linux works just fine for gaming and everything else I need out of a personal computer.
Sorry if that came off as a random rant. But there are some very real practical implications of Microsoft’s decision.
Is there actually something wrong/defective with my R7 1700? This will make 1st gen owners wonder if there’s something wrong with their chips.
It will make the upgrade process more difficult for 1st gen owners.
It will impact the resale value of Ryzen 1xxx CPUs and systems.
Tin foil hat time: MS’ blog post says they worked with AMD on this decision. Does AMD want to force old Ryzen owners to cough up some dineros to upgrade?
Hmm, I also wonder if Ryzen 5 1600AF owners will be able to upgrade the normal way…
Consume new hardware. It’s the name of the game. Always has been like that.
First gen Ryzen was a bit buggy on release. I don’t know if you remember the whole RMA debacle with some of the CPUs. Lots of people were affected and even after getting a new CPU some still experienced issues. Then you had all the mitigations and security issues that also affected AMD CPUs (just not as much as Intel). My guess is that MS simply drew a line and is certifying CPUs that it considers “secure enough”.
I still run a R7 1700 and have to do some tweaking with my BIOS so the thing is stable even at stock speeds. Even then it sometimes likes to crash on Windows for no apparent reason. I mostly run Linux so I never really cared to get it 100% stable in Windows.
Not sure I want to chuck a perfectly usable (and powerful!) system into the landfill just 'coz M$ sez so. Interesting you had more problems with Windows; for several months I had persistent problems with MCEs in Linux, but Windows ran like a dream. The MCEs eventually went away. I presume a kernel update fixed that.
Right now I’m running Fedora 34 and Windoze in a VM w/ GPU pass though. It works, but the performance hit is more severe than my previous attempts on Intel hardware. Or instead of the CPU, perhaps it’s because I use an Nvidia GPU for my host video.
I read somewhere 1st gen Ryzen is missing some sort of crypto support which would significantly impact performance.
I’ll see if i can find the link.
edit:
this mentions it a bit i think:
Essentially older CPUs without the relevant support will tank for performance with all the security features enabled. Its not just Ryzen 1, but Skylake and earlier as well.
Probably all the memory incompatibility, since it was errors in general and early Ryzen was kinda really picky, you could have ram that would “work” but you’d get degraded performance due to unseen errors
the beef is the TPM on ryzen was cracked.
ryzen+ and after have an updated TPM that uses different encryption that is incompatible with the earlier version. so they decided just to support the newer standard.
but.
saying that, the other day the new TPM was cracked and microsoft rolled back on there statement only to support newer hardware.
as for upgrading. i wont be in such a hurry this time.
as learning ways to disable all the telemetry was a pain in the ass the first few weeks after win10’s launch. im expecting the same kind of abuses by microsoft this time round also.
I think the percentage of crashes they’re giving out it’s just a smokescreen to stop less knowledgeable people from install Windows 11 and complain later (which will inevitably happen since Microsoft, in my opinion, is just dropping all the bullshit updates that bloat Windows 10, made a new theme for it and sent the OS out in the wild).
What’s really a point of contention that should stop people from installing Windows 11 on “unsupported” hardware is the lack of native support for all the security features in the new update. It’s like what happened with Spectre and Meltdown protection that hit Intel CPUs on Windows pretty hard. And since those instructions won’t be hardware accelerated they might be more susceptible to errors and make the OS crash.
That’s my understanding of the issue and I still don’t agree on this choice: let the users do their stuff and warn them.
I’m running Ryzen 1600X (14nm one) and at the time I didn’t know about onboard TPM and got the Gigbyte branded TPM that plugs into the motherboard to use with BitLocker.
Given that the TPM prices are 10-50x of what I paid at the time, I wanted to run compatibility check, but on MS website it just says coming soon™. Now it’s not just the TPM? FFS Microsoft.
I plan to keep my current machine for several more years (already going for 5). Like you, I see no reason to throw away perfectly good and more than capable hardware (even if this Ryzen system has given me more problems than my old FX system). With current prices, a whole system upgrade is unfeasible (a proper upgrade for my current motherboard would be double what I paid). I still have the option of going for a 3700X CPU and doubling my RAM, but I want to wait a bit for prices to go down a little. On the GPU side my old Polaris is still putting a good fight.
As VMs, I run W10 as a VM guest and performance is a noticeably sluggish even if I give the VM 50% of my resources.
Easy matching of AMDs part release, during Intels Core Gen7 lineup. Though the likes of AMD Ryzen, wouldn’t be in the same roping, of that Spectre meltdown [+ other affiliated exploits].
Also forcing public, to buy up newer hardware… NOT the best timing, in seeing current status of things
… I wonder, when was the last time, did they try pulling off that stunt off?
If you’re running it in HyperV without a dedicated GPU, or inside of KVM the performance isn’t likely due to your CPU selection - if you’re talking interactive desktop use.
The inbuilt display drivers for KVM and HyperV are pretty crap. Pass-through or maybe spice (on KVM) may differ, but that isn’t configured out of the box.
Indeed FFS MS. The reason behind that was when it was first up it would give older hardware just unknown or unhelpful errors saying the hardware was not compatible with zero further reasoning.
So now we have things like this thread and MS were getting so many complaints and questions about why the new system they have is not supported by the new win 10 update… Sorry win 11, I was taken in by MS say 10 would be the last mainline release… So MS just took the compatibility cheaker away, no eorros, no problems right?
