Nobody's been clear on how this will be accomplished, but I can really only see three options. 1) Actual blacklisting of the CPU in a Win7 update. This would

Nobody's been clear on how this will be accomplished, but I can really only see three options. 1) Actual blacklisting of the CPU in a Win7 update. This would be foolish at best, since people would just decline the patch or use modified install media. 2) Lack of support through lack of drivers for new hardware Maybe the most likely, but still not guaranteed to prevent people from running Windows 7 and either working around missing support or disabling the signed driver requirement and hacking up newer drivers until they do what's desired on Win7. 3) Requiring Win7 backward-compat hooks in BIOS/UEFI not be present on Kaby Lake+ motherboards. This would probably be the most effective, though it would require more coordination and signoff than I'd necessarily guess they'll muster.