Microsoft has extended its enterprise support policy for Windows 7 and 8.1 running on Intel’s sixth generation Skylake processors to January 2020 and 2023 respectively.
The driver was stubbornly high levels of enterprise use of Windows 7 and 8.1 (still 47.01% and 7.8%). Microsoft typically offers 10 years of product support for Windows. The support is broken into two five-year phases, called "mainstream" and "extended." As Windows 10 is Microsoft's last product brand name for the Windows client, support policies become irrelevant.
Microsoft does, however, have a point, and that is that the hardware and operating system are closely coupled and it is getting hard to support Windows 10 on older hardware – especially on machines which may not have UEFI (software bios) or devices on which rootkits and malware can hide in firmware.
The extension makes sense as it allows enterprise time to depreciate their existing investments and still run standard operating system environments like Windows 7/8.1 on modern hardware. Future silicon platforms including Intel’s upcoming 7th Gen Intel Core (Kaby Lake) processor family and AMD’s 7th generation processors (Bristol Ridge) or later will only be supported on Windows 10, and all future silicon releases will require the latest release of Windows 10.
{loadposition ray}