Comment by account42
22 days ago
This is because Intel and AMD can develop support for your new hardware and add it to the kernel and userland drivers before the hardware releases. They new hardware GPU hardware revisions are definitely not backwards compatible and always need at least some changes. CPUs are a different story due to x86 being x86.
No: this is obviously incorrect, as even dead operating systems that will never experience a new version or have any driver support work well enough on newer Intel hardware. This is due to some combination of extremely long-lived standards and epic forwards compatibility in the design of the BIOS layer. For a better answer, read mschuster91's response.