TPM 2.0 support will not be necessary, Windows 11 will suffice with fTPM 1.2

You know it. Download Microsoft’s tool to verify the minimum requirements for your assembly (WindowsPCHealthCheckSetup.msi, 13MB), you will run it and find that your report does not fit. Microsoft will keep the foxes. If you don’t see a problem with the basic hardware setup …

… There will probably be a problem with the TPM or Trusted Platform Module. In Czech, the device is often called secure crypto processor, encryption processor, encryption coprocessor ap. Which in itself suggests what it is for. Windows 11 is generally said to require TPM 2.0 (which may not be entirely true, but we’ll get to that).

TPM introduced the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) consortium in 2009, the last revision of the original version (TPM 1.2) arrived in 2011. It was followed by TPM 2.0, which became a huge scarecrow at the time of the arrival of Windows 8.1. Microsoft announced that it would be mandatory from the beginning of 2015, but before that happened, it was relaxed and announced a change in December 2014, that is, the TPM 2.0 requirement is optional. Although without it, some functions do not work as connected standbyBut it is possible to live without it, and many people were quite relieved after Microsoft’s change of mind at the time. It is interesting that the Czech Wikipedia still has a statement from six years ago that “TPM 2.0 will be mandatory from 2015.”

Photo: Reddit / echoniner007

But let’s go back to eleven. For users who try the minimum requirements test that have not passed, it is usually sufficient to enable TPM 2.0 support (encryption) in the BIOS, and the problem will not be reported next time.

But, as I mentioned earlier, even with Windows 11, the TPM 2.0 requirement is probably not as attractive as it sounds. According to AMD’s Robert Hallock, Microsoft claims in detailed documentation that fTPM 1.2 (ie TPM 1.2 firmware) will also suffice. The important thing is the future tense, the current preview version (filtered final) of Windows 11, requires (f) TPM 2.0, but some of the future builds will provide support for fTPM 1.2 and the requirements will decrease. If you’re wondering why version 1.2 isn’t directly supported, the TPM 2.0 specification didn’t bother to address backward compatibility, so if a developer wants to support both versions, they need to prepare support for both separately, and this it will take some additional time.

(f) TPM 1.2 also supports relatively bearded motherboards, so making this version available should significantly expand the user base capable of upgrading to Windows 11.