this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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In another attempt to convince us that "AI PCs" are somehow fundamentally different from the PCs we're already using, AMD has officially dropped support for Windows 10 from its new AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series platform. This can be observed by glancing at the official AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 specs page, which now only lists 64-bit versions of Windows 11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu as having official support.

Is this a big deal? It depends on how much you like using Windows while also disliking Windows 11. Personally, I prefer Windows 10 as a daily driver, and will only resort to Windows 11 use for professional needs.

That said, the gaming performance and compatibility of Linux operating systems get better every day, so dropping Windows 10 shouldn't necessarily be a deal breaker for these CPUs. After all, the Ryzen 9 AI 9 HX 370 can perform formidably, even in Silent mode. But users who were interested in those laptops and wished to downgrade to Windows 10 are now totally out of luck, it seems.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

How does a CPU drop support for an OS? Seems the wrong way round to me. Is there a Windows 10 specific way of loading 5 into the accumulator or something?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Can its AI portion be used for something other than AI? If not then no big loss other than wasted silicon.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (1 children)

“Amd won’t support OS that isn’t supported anymore”

This isn’t news and it definitely doesn’t need the commentary it’s receiving here.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Windows 10 has support for another full year...at least.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Mainstream support ends this October

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No new hardware being sold comes with windows 10. They have no profit incentive to support it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Even if my new hardware came with 11 included "free", I wouldn't use it and find my way to install 10 on it.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago

Put Puppy Linux https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ on your older machines,

& Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Lubuntu/Xubuntu on your newer ones.

https://ubuntu.com/desktop

https://kubuntu.org/

https://lubuntu.me/

https://xubuntu.org/


or use UbuntuStudio, for a full audio-visual workstation..

https://ubuntustudio.org/


Problem Solved(tm)

_ /\ _

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

If Weird Al died on a Friday and came back the following Sunday, would he be Ryzen Al?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

My impression was that normally OSes support chips rather than the other day around.

I guess CPU vendors can push out microcode updates using mechanisms in the OS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

They probably want to be on best terms with microsoft. M$ have been heavily marketing ARM CPUs from Qualcomm and AMD don't want to be left bihind.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Ok, so, no official support for Windows 10, but can you still install and run Windows 10 and renouce whatever "support" or will it just not work?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

According to this article, regarding Intel Alder Lake

Intel's Thread Director technology is the key here. This hardware-based technology uses a trained AI model to identify different types of workloads at the chip level. It then provides that enhanced telemetry data to Windows 11 via a Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) built into the chip. The operating system then uses that data to help assure that threads are scheduled to either the P- or E-cores in an optimized and intelligent manner.

However, while Windows 11 exploits Thread Director's full feature set, Windows 10 does not. Due to optimizations for Intel's Lakefield chips, Windows 10 is aware of hybrid topologies, meaning it knows the difference between the performance and efficiency of the different core types. Still, it doesn't have access to the thread-specific telemetry provided by Intel's hardware-based solution.

As a result, threads can and will land on the incorrect cores under some circumstances, which Intel says will result in run-to-run variability in benchmarks. It will also impact the chips during normal use, too. Intel says the difference amounts to a few percentage points of performance and that the chips still provide an "awesome" user experience. We'll have to see how that works in the real world to assess the impact.

Intel also says that users can assign the priority of background tasks through the standard Windows settings, but these global settings apply to all programs. So it remains to be seen if that will have a meaningful impact on performance variability in Windows 10.

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-shares-alder-lake-pricing-specs-and-gaming-performance/4

so, it's still works but not optimized for some apps. Probably this will be the same with AMD's latest CPU.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean, they list Red Hat and Ubuntu as the only OFFICIALLY supported Linux distros and both of those are based on other “non-supported” distros, so I don’t think it means much.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Red Hat (RHEL) is not based on any other distro, like Ubuntu is with Debian. RHEL is downstream of Fedora, meaning that RHEL developers can work on code that affects Fedora AND RHEL. This is not really true of Debian and Ubuntu. They are distinct projects with different goals. In many ways, Ubuntu is beholden to what Debian does. This isn’t usually a problem because Debian is very conservative in its approach to software. Ubuntu doesn’t usually have to worry about Debian screwing with something Ubuntu is trying to do.

Which, is all to say that there is no other distribution you can officially equate to RHEL like you can with Debian & Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The person was asking a fairly simple question and I gave an answer that avoided jumping into the genealogy of GNU/Linux based distributions. Many apologies, won’t happen again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I mean you were pretty damn correct in your statement. Fedora is not officially supported, neither is Debian, a couple popular derivatives are though. My guess is Canonical and IBM were willing to add stuff to make AMD feel confident enough to list them as "Officially" supported.

Personally I'm not a fan of RHEL or Ubuntu but absolutely love Debian. Part of me feels like I would like RHEL if I used it enough, but I use Window's daily at work and still don't like it...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

It will probably just work, even if not officially. If any weird Windows issues crop up, Microsoft may or may not fix them. I think AMD even provided workarounds and special drivers for Windows 7, just without any official support. They may not do that this time around though, since a lot of things have changed.

[–] [email protected] 86 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I mean, there's always another option beyond W11, if you catch my drift

*loud penguin noises*

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

yes but that defeats the purpose

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

well for the handful of old-ass games I like that refuse to play nice on linux I'll keep that in mind

[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I will help anyone who is interested in installing Linux

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I've been very uninterested in linux as I use my pc predominantly for gaming but after I got a Steam Deck I am very interested in swapping over to bazzite by the time windows 10 support ends as I saw how easy it is to get games working on linux.

I am kinda concerned that installers of games are not going to work on linux though as I install my non-steam games on my windows pc and copy them over to the deck. Do you know a way to get installers work on linux?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Lutris will let you install games like this, its pretty straightforward

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You want to be using Lutris for non-steam games

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Or Bottles!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I really need to get GPU Passthrough sorted

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If your motherboard supports it, it’s really easy

Ensure IOMMU is enabled and run the little script in section 2.2 to see if you can isolate the graphics card

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

After that, you can do everything in the virtual-manager GUI

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Could you please explain how to do it in only the GUI? I need to disable my Nvidia GPU with scripts, detaching the GPU from my main OS, before I can pass it. It's not 100% reliable

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I’m working off the assumption you are using one GPU for the host and one for the guest

The guest one is permanently blacklisted on the host, and you can select the passthrough settings in the GUI

If you’re dynamically detaching the GPU, my statement was incorrect

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Oh okey, then I am with you! I have an integrated GPU in my processor that have been tinkering with but for my usecase it's not enough. Ideally would I need two external GPUs in my system so I can game on both Windows and Linux without rebooting or leaving Linux. Detaching a GPU from a running system is quite messy 😅

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Isn't the same true for the 7950X3D?

I doubt you would have many issues using win10 on this platform if you wanted to.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

It's all about getting users to buy new PCs that can run the AMAZING AI! (I'm being sarcastic here). It's good for AMD and Microsoft's pockets.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I'm guess its more a cost savings effort for AMD that they won't have to do a development and testing channel for Windows 10 anymore.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I mean, sure but even phoenix based OEM platforms tend to ship with win11 anyways, right? Did any of those release with win10 ootb?