6 ms·

Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips. Not just their own chips but also nearly all the features of their competitor's c

• gruez 6y ago
  >Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips The CPUs might be, but the chipset drivers definitely aren't. You'll have a hard time booting windows 95 on a ryzen system, for instance. Hell, ryzen doesn't officially support windows 7. Still, I get your point, standardization in the PC space (mainly stemming from the "IBM compatible" standard) has made backwards/forwards compatibility much easier.
  • zokier 6y ago
    Somewhat controversially at the time, Kaby Lake from Intel dropped Windows 7 support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skyla...
  • zrm 6y ago
    What anybody wants is the other way around though. If you want to run Windows 95 on modern hardware you run it in a VM; running it on bare metal isn't that interesting. And the current versions of various Linux distributions do run on 25+ year old PC hardware, if you really want to.
  • josephg 6y ago
    True, but old hardware can run windows 10, or modern Linux just fine. Windows and Linux (and others) seem to hold the policy of drivers for old hardware being maintained and supported seemingly indefinitely. This work isn’t free, but there’s no reason Qualcomm and Samsung and others couldn’t do the same.
  • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    I am not sure about win95, but applications compiled 15 years ago still run on windows 10. That's stability.