I spoke with an AMD VP about Windows 10 end of life and transitioning to Windows 11 — here's what you need to know

We have a lot of discussions with Microsoft and the [manufacturers] about the opportunity here and about the refresh. The opportunity space here is hundreds of millions of devices.

So it's a massive opportunity for devices that are running Windows 10 actively today ... we are seeing folks make the move. We've seen strong data that that's happening.

In my personal life or folks that I work with ... they've seen the pop-up message that says, 'To maintain support, you need to move to Windows 11.'

They have questions about it. So it's bringing people back into a place where they're considering a PC purchase.

The first piece is that the Windows 11 upgrade is free as long as the device meets spec. We can go back several generations of our product and still see it support Windows 11. So it's not just, hey, you have to have the latest and greatest.

Our product road map has been so consistently strong for several generations; past generations of our product will just directly migrate to Windows 11 without a hardware upgrade.

The hardware updates that we're seeing are the ones that do not meet spec. Generally, those are older systems.

What we're hearing and seeing directly from end users and enterprises that we've deployed to is that by going from that older technology to the latest Zen 5 product or the latest Windows 11 product, they really didn't know what they were missing.

The level of performance and battery life advantage they've got has really transformed the way they work, the way they get things done.

We're confident that the performance advantage and the security advantage...are going to be so much better to justify that update.

We partnered with Microsoft from Windows 7 and Windows 10, and... went through that both in the consumer side as well as the commercial side. We took a lot of learnings from that.

From that partnership with Microsoft, as well as working with end customers, the thing that I think we learned ... is that it really requires a lot of careful planning and messaging. You saw in some of the past Windows transitions there was the date got pushed out or it changed over time.

And one of the things I'll really credit Microsoft with in this Windows 11 messaging is that the company has been very clear with the timeline. It went out more clearly than it had in the past, and I think there was more of a component of the advantages of Windows 11.

It is the most secure platform on which you can compute. It is the easiest to use platform on which you can compute. Really clearly stating that Windows 10 is sunsetting, but there are so many advantages in Windows 11 to be gained.

Yeah, because I work at AMD, I'm tech support to all my friends and family. So I get that question. I've actually recently had a lot of folks who go to school with my kids; they're back doing the back-to-school thing, and like, 'Hey, do I need to do this update?'

Microsoft's got some great literature on the reasons why, and so just pointing them out, here are the reasons why. As I mentioned, I've talked to those folks after they made the upgrade or made the purchase, and it's all been positive stories.

We're doing both in parallel. We know that there's a part of the market that is on that cutting edge, utilizing local LLM on PCs today.

You've got the Copilot experience, which is one example of applications that use AI. So we know that there's a group in the buying public today that wants that capability a little bit more cutting-edge.

But we also know that there are folks who just want a great PC and don't need that capability. So we're offering both of those in parallel. Our Ryzen 200 chips do have AI capabilities, but it's on a smaller level.

And then our Ryzen AI 300 solution has up to 50 TOPS of AI capability, and we offer both of those in the market together, in fact, in many cases, in the same system. We actually designed the product such that they are for a specific notebook design. We could interchange those.

We decided in that way because we knew there was going to be a progression of people into this AI capability. And we've seen forecasts that show it's happening over the next four or five years. So we're addressing both of those customers.

I'm a big believer in the 'buy once, cry once' philosophy. You don't make these purchases every day, and they're important to your life. An average PC user gets so much of their life done on that PC.

It's a very important purchase. So yes, I would spring for that future proofing, because there’s things you can do with that additional capability now.

I strongly advocate for that.

But again, if somebody says, 'this is my price point,' and that happens to be a Ryzen 200, I don't think they're going to be dissatisfied with that purchase.

Well, Lisa's never put on a bad show. She always brings the products and brings the excitement of that event. I think we've won CES many times with our keynotes. And so yeah, it's exciting stuff to come. Obviously, we can't talk about future products before their time, but we really encourage folks to see what we have coming around the corner

Lisa's going to bring a lot of excitement to the stage.