As in, Iron (Fe). Microsoft is about as shady as it gets when it comes to the future of its operating system, but we have a hint that Windows 10 21H1 officially has a codename attached to it.
Iron.
This interesting nugget (pun always intended) of information was revealed in a blog post by Microsoft, which has since been edited to remove the codename part.
In the post original post, the company talked about support for DirectML and CUDA was coming to Insiders in the Fast ring when the begin testing the next version of the operating system, which it called to be from the Iron (Fe) branch.
This is what the blog post looked like originally:
Makes clear what the recent Fast ring builds that are coming from the mn_release branch, where ‘mn’ stands for Manganese, which is the codename for 20H2.
The Fast ring of the Windows Insider Program is currently in a perpetual state of prerelease builds, with Redmond not committing any particular build to a particular release. But the story of the development of the OS is a bit more interesting than that.
That’s because the preview builds being released are not 20H2.
Originally, the 20H2 release was supposed to be Windows 10X, whereby the mainline Windows 10 was to get an enablement package, similar to what was rolled out for 19H2. However, with Windows 10X now officially delayed, Microsoft seems to be going through the motions.
As things stand, the company plans to start flighting builds from the Iron branch to the Fast ring in June.
Windows 10 20H1, meanwhile, is going to be a combination of what we have already seen in the Fast ring and the new features that we will see between now till the end of the year.
Changes like the visual appearance of the Start Menu, x64 emulation on Windows on ARM, and more.
Metal stuff.
