Microsoft recently confirmed that your PC needs TPM chips to support Windows 11. It also updated its documentation to indicate that the previous guidance for minimum TPM requirements was incorrect. Instead of TPM 1.2, which was initially thought to be sufficient, Windows 11 now requires TPM 2.0 as the minimum requirement.
Installing Windows 11 on an unsupported CPU and TPM 1.2
But what is TPM in the first place, and why is Microsoft making this hardware change now? Here’s everything you need to know to clear up the confusion surrounding Windows 11’s TPM requirements.
Windows 11 is being touted as the free OS update that will cost many people some money. Much of that has to do with the hard TPM requirement without which many will not be able to upgrade to the new Windows.
As Director of Enterprise and OS Security, David Weston, explains, “The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a chip that is either integrated into your PC’s motherboard or separately added to the CPU. Its purpose is to protect encryption keys, user credentials, and other sensitive data behind a hardware barrier, preventing malware and attackers from accessing or tampering with that data.”
