Or maybe they will launch Win 12 with optional TPM support.
Imho making the OS(es) TPM only cannot be good for their business, many people are still on Win 10 with no intention to switch, since their motheboard does not support TPM and do not want to upgrade PC / waste PCI-E slot on TPM extension.
No chance.
You concentrate on the TPM but ignore the CPU requirements…? If you have a CPU that is up to spec, you have a TPM - they’re built in the CPU. Most people just need to turn it on in the BIOS (or update their BIOS as motherboard manufacturers have turned on the TPM as “Windows 11 support”)
The truth of it is, every “jump” OS, i.e. 95, XP, 7, 10 has run really poorly on >5 year old chips at the time of launching. And MS got panned at “how slow” is was. But it was also the norm to update your PC more often. Now speed increases have slowed and Moore’s Law has ended, it’s about security and performance hit of said security. The truth is, the kernel hardening and malware protection and encryption built into 11 to make it far less likely to get infected than 10 and 7 means it needs the hardware support to do it. Without it, it runs far slower or is less secure. Neither anyone wants.
When 10 support ends in 2 years time, the lowest supported processor for 11 will be nearly 9 years old…
I wonder how many people are suffering from terrible performance due to the AMD fTPU being a piece of shit? I’ve tried to turn it on for two different CPUs of different generations (3700X and 5800X) and they both had horrible stuttering. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t upgrade to Windows 11 like Microsoft wants because the experience would be unacceptable.
Do you have any references for the reduced malware infections provided by Win 11 that requires the TPU?
It’s not directly the TPM - it’s the enhanced security instructions in the newer chips (which is the real reason for the very definite line drawn).
Read https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/why-windows-11-has-such-strict-hardware-requirements-according-to-microsoft/ from “A towering stack of security acronyms”