News

Windows 10 in July? Yes, Says Tech Exec

Microsoft does not confirm that date.

• By Kurt Mackie
• 04/21/2015

The release date for Windows 10 has been speculated about for many months, but with precious little hard support for any dates. That may have changed, thanks to one of Microsoft's chip-making partners.

Windows 10 will launch at the "end of July," according to Microsoft hardware-maker AMD.

Lisa Su, AMD's president and CEO, disclosed the date last week during an earnings conference call with financial analysts. The chipmaker reported a net loss of $180 million in its first quarter on Thursday. The loss was largely attributed to a down market for PCs and notebooks.

In response to an analyst's question about AMD's future financial guidance, Su pointed to a possible uptick for AMD with the arrival of Windows 10.

"What we also are factoring in is, you know, with the Windows 10 launch at the end of July, we are watching sort of the impact of that on the back-to-school season, and expect that it might have a bit of a delay to the normal back-to-school season inventory build-up," Su said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

So far, Microsoft has just promised that Windows 10 will appear this summer. No specific release date has been disclosed.

Possibly, the July release date mentioned by Su could be the "release-to-manufacturing" date, which is when Microsoft's hardware partners first get the Windows operating system bits to install on machines. The imaged hardware products then get released at a later date to the general public.

AMD also announced last week in its earnings call that the company will exit the dense server systems business, although it is staying in the server processor market, including x86 and ARM processors. Specifically, AMD is moving away from its SeaMicro microserver business. Su said that microservers have "not developed at the pace we might have thought a couple of years ago."

AMD completed its acquisition of SeaMicro in 2012 for about $334 million. SeaMicro makes energy-efficient server appliances, or microservers, designed for installation in datacenters. Some of the power efficiencies came from running Intel Atom-based low-power cores, although AMD also offers a power-saving Intel Xeon-based model.

Microsoft was asked to confirm the July Windows 10 release date. There was no confirmation at press time. Windows 10 is still at the "preview" test stage.

Microsoft recently released a second preview build of Windows 10 for phones, which includes an early version of the new Spartan browser, as well as a Maps preview.

Microsoft has also recently described improvements to its "virtual desktops" feature in Windows 10, which lets users set up different desktops with an arrangement of apps. Microsoft improved the drag-and-drop support between virtual desktops and added an option for how virtual desktops should display on the taskbar. Virtual desktops are created by clicking the Task View icon located on Windows 10's Task Bar.

For more Windows 10 details, see RCPmag.com's 2015 Microsoft Product Roadmap, located at this page.