Yet here I am still finding it usefull.
It isn't as useful as it used to be.
Five years ago, you could buy any x86 PC hardware you wanted, and you'd get full driver support for it under Win7 without question. Today you can't. As the months roll by, Win7 diehards have it worse and worse. Stay in denial if you like.
I want a CPU upgrade not RR specifically. RR was just an interesting option until I found out it doesn't work on my OS. So I'll just choose a different CPU that works.
But Raven Ridge
does work. It's your OS that is the problem. There will come a day when absolutely none of the new PC hardware on the market supports Win7. Will you declare all that hardware to be non-functional?
I'm not that concerned what makes perfect sense for AMD I'm more concerned about myself. And I'm not even sure if it makes sense because a year earlier it made sense to make sure SR runs Win7 and there has been no drastic change on the OS front in that time. And I'm not really ok with MS incentivising hardware manufacturers to move away from Win7 and them complying.
Go march on Redmond. Otherwise, you are going to get whatever it is they choose to sell you, or nothing at all. Who you are as a PC user, and what you want as a consumer, are sufficiently "niche" that companies like AMD can profit from ignoring you. Who really wants to support two different OSes anyway, especially when the company that produced both, only actively supports one?
The voice of the consumer is not calling for long-term OS support for Win7. AMD isn't hearing this, either because the voices are not raised in unison (backed by wallets) or because MS has helped them to plug their ears. Intel is the same way. Who can blame them? Supporting multiple operating systems is a drain on resources. Win7 users by-and-large are not buying up new hardware to run under that old OS. Most of today's Wintel DiY buyers are buying for Win10. 100% of the Wintel OEM buyers are buying hardware mated to Win10. I would expect more support for modern hardware under Linux than I would Win7 at this point. That ought to tell you something.
We're in a market now dominated by smartphones and tablets. PCs are losing market share (still), and DIY PC users are a niche within that niche. Win7 is the last MS OS that you will truly own. MS wants it deprecated because their business model depends on that. All us PC enthusiasts on the Wintel platform have to come to terms with the future in one way or another. Most of the world never really cared about our hobby, but we skated by just fine by buying top-of-the-line variants of the same hardware that went into the millions upon millions of PCs going into living rooms and schools all across the modernized world. The mass sales of low-end hardware supported our ecosystem - including operating systems like Win7.
A lot of that money moved, and things changed. Now you have Win10.
Of course, when you bought into a closed-source OS, you did know what could happen to you, didn't you?
All that aside, I feel fortunate that companies like AMD can still be bothered to produce desktop variants of chips like Raven Ridge. They could have gone full-bore on the server segment, sold us "dumbed down" HEDT products like Threadripper and maybe Summit Ridge (maybe), and targeted all their low-end stuff to OEMs exclusively - meaning a small selection of BGA boards with no real overclocking, all aimed at AiOs/slim desktops or laptops. It would have been a safe bet for them.
But they're still cranking out some Raven Ridge products for the DiY user, and to me that's exceptional. The business case for those setups has been pretty shaky lately.
it never happened before that a S.O. died before the end of support, After Windows XP went EOL software and hardware still had drivers for it for a while.
Windows 7 is not yet EOL, but right now it does not support newer hardware and there is software that does not work either, that means its petty much dead before going EOL.
MS learned a lot from WinXP. One of the things they learned is that it's hard to sell licenses for a new OS (notably, Vista) when people are happy and well-supported on the OS already on their computer, with a fully-transferable license they can use ad nauseam. MS's sales were pegged on two major pillars: the continued proliferation of PCs, and the general awful-ness of their old software requiring regular OS upgrades. They really had to knock one out of the park with Win7 to push people off XP. Now the mass-proliferation of PCs has wound down and MS knows full well that it's hard to get people to give up their old OS licenses, so they have to go in a different direction.
One of the casualties is proper driver support for new hardware under Win7.