Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 8.1 on Intel Galileo boards November 30

Microsoft will no longer support Windows 8.1 on Intel’s low-cost Galileo boards, beginning on November 30.

Designed with the maker community in mind, Intel’s Arduino-compatible Galileo boards ship with Intel Quark SoC X1000 chips. Intel and Microsoft are traditionally closely aligned, but when it comes to these boards, the two blue-chip technology companies are going their separate ways.

“While we’ve seen some fantastic innovation with the platform, unfortunately it [Galileo] does not meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 IoT Core,” Microsoft wrote in an update to the Galileo section of the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page for its Internet of Things (IoT) initiative. (Hat tip to ITworld for reporting on the news today.)

A Microsoft spokesperson sent VentureBeat a statement on November 19 to elaborate on the update:

We’ve seen some fantastic innovation with the Galileo platform, but unfortunately it does not meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 IoT Core. The support for Windows 8.1 on Galileo Gen 1 and Gen 2 will end on November 30, 2015. Wiring support is now available on Windows 10 IoT Core and this helps you to migrate your existing Galileo projects to Windows 10 IoT Core. We continue to focus on providing a great experience for Makers with Windows 10 IoT Core and are excited to see what they create.

Available free of charge, Windows 10 IoT Core is just one of seven flavors of Windows 10. Support for Windows IoT Core is available on the Raspberry Pi 2, the Intel Atom-based MinnowBoard Max, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon-based DragonBoard 410c.

Microsoft last year shipped developer kits for running Windows on Galileo boards. And in the run-up to the launch of Windows 10, Steve Teixeira, director of program management for the Internet of Things team in Microsoft’s Operating Systems Group, name-dropped Galileo in a blog post. Now, less than six months after Windows 10 came out, support for Windows 8.1 on the system is getting yanked.

Updated at 2:35 p.m. Pacific on November 19 to reflect that Galileo support is being cut for Windows 8.1, not Windows 10 IoT Core.