Windows 11 was announced by Microsoft which will be bringing in a number of big changes in the way we use our computers. Perhaps most importantly for many is the fact that the operating system will be completely free of charge – a big deviation from previous licensing models and an effort from Microsoft to try and get more people to upgrade to the new OS sooner.
And even though the minimum specs of the operating system are also low enough for most PCs to make the upgrade quite comfortably, it is likely that your computer may still not be able to make the big upgrade due to your CPU not been supported. As showcased by a few people who were part of the early access program getting the following messages and further investigated by The Verge:
While Microsoft initially didn’t announce the specific CPUs required to run Windows 11, it has since clarified this and it has revealed that the operating system will only support TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chips on existing and new devices. So, what is a TPM exactly? Well, it is essentially a separate chip that is either integrated into your PC’s motherboard or added separately into the CPU and responsible for protecting encryption keys, user credentials, and other sensitive data behind a hardware barrier so that malware and attackers can’t access or tamper with that data.
Microsoft sees these chips as a key resource to drastically improve software quality, but the problem is that only newer chips developed over the past few years support them, meaning that even though your ageing computer is powerful enough to run Windows 11, it won’t meet its stringent security requirements. Something which I can see stopping many people from making the upgrade.
The following below processors are required by Microsoft to run Windows 11:
WINDOWS 11 SUPPORT FOR INTEL
- Intel 8th Gen (Coffee Lake)
- Intel 9th Gen (Coffee Lake Refresh)
- Intel 10th Gen (Comet Lake)
- Intel 10th Gen (Ice Lake)
- Intel 11th Gen (Rocket Lake)
- Intel 11th Gen (Tiger Lake)
- Intel Xeon Skylake-SP
- Intel Xeon Cascade Lake-SP
- Intel Xeon Cooper Lake-SP
- Intel Xeon Ice Lake-SP
WINDOWS 11 SUPPORT FOR AMD
- AMD Ryzen 2000
- AMD Ryzen 3000
- AMD Ryzen 4000
- AMD Ryzen 5000
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2000
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3000
- AMD EPYC 2nd Gen
- AMD EPYC 3rd Gen
I would guess that most PC users are not running these new chips and so either Microsoft will need to find a way to perhaps not be so restrictive on the security side of things or people simply aren’t going to bother with the new version of Windows – no matter how good it is. Not only is a new CPU expensive, even an older 8th generation Intel, but with a current global chip shortage causing process to increase, people are going to be more reluctant to upgrade than ever before.
Hopefully, this is something Microsoft looks to address soon, or we may end up seeing Windows 10 stick around for a lot longer than the company wants.
Last Updated: June 28, 2021
Iskape
June 28, 2021 at 15:07
I’m running a AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, so I should be okay!
Lu
June 29, 2021 at 01:25
Sigh my 7700k is won’t work then. Oh well. I’m happy on 10.
HvR
June 29, 2021 at 10:27
If you run the health check but get the CPU not supported error just have a check in the BIOS since it seems in a lot of non-Enterprise builds it is disabled by default in the BIOS. Intel it is PTT and AMD TPMv2.
Also also a lot of motherboards produced over the last decade will have an TPM expander header in which you can just pop a compatible TPM like the one in the picture of the article.