content: There not really, its just people making mountains out of mole hills. Plenty of newer processors are not supported by XP, Vista, and even Win7 because to take advantage of the newer features requires a patch or two, hell even Win7 had to be patched to stop it over scheduling tasks on early Bulldozer CPUs.  Microsoft is just not going to look after users of older versions of windows if any kind of severe incompatibility issues come up. If you are going to be an early Zen adopter you might want to make doubly sure that if there are any issues with the OS you want to run you have a method to get around them.