Blog post from Microsoft is now up.
MRORANGE Please add to OP.
Windows Insiders, Today we’re releasing our first Insider build for Windows 11, and we’re looking forward to the insight that comes from you installing and using on a variety of your PCs. Last week’s
blogs.windows.com
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Particularly the following quote:
Is it possible that some of the unsupported CPUs (Intel 7th generation CPUs and AMD Ryzen 1st gen) don't have the features that are in bold?
Oh, that's interesting. Just from following their links and googling the mentioned features, Intel did rather recently include VBS features - specifically MBEC - in silicon... on 7th gen. Perhaps that's why their confident they won't extend support to 6th gen.
AMD was harder to crack. The feature mentioned in the post linked in the blog (GMET) was actually just added in Zen 3. But through some digging, it seems they did silently add MBEC to Zen 2.
A quick aside, though; the blog post is written as if Zen+ doesn't exist. That would be fine; it can generally be treated as a more efficient Zen in terms of feature support. But the official CPU list only includes Zen+, not Zen. At this point I'm wondering if including Zen+ was a legitimate mistake.
It should be noted that they claim hardware support for these features merely makes them more efficient, cutting down on power and performance hits, and indeed the enterprise space has used these concepts before MBEC existed. The blog posts seems to indicate the difference may be pretty measurable, but it's hard to say; perhaps it's just infeasible to support both a version that uses MBEC and a version that doesn't. I wonder if they've actually enabled HVCI (the OS feature that uses MBEC) on all Windows 11 machines or not; perhaps they're allowing it to be disabled in the Insider builds just to get more testing data, but will remove the option upon release. That actually sounds like a decent reason not to officially support Windows 11 on these older CPUs despite allowing it to run on them for now.
As for whether to expect changes to CPU requirements in the final build, I'd say it seems likely. I genuinely can't imagine the AMD line will stay where it is; based on the VBS requirements either it'll go up to Zen 2 or down to Zen. There's good reason to hope Kaby Lake will be supported on Intel's side, but I'd say Skylake isn't likely; I think that sentence was removed just because it wasn't 100%, and they've realized they should limit the number of uncertainties they're putting out.
I don't know why they're not committed to supporting Kaby Lake already. Perhaps it has to do with the new driver model they mentioned, and perhaps that's related to the Zen/Zen+ divide as well. But that's impossible to find info on.
So, I freaked out a bit after reading this thread and pulled the trigger on a TPM module for my Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero Mobo. All of my PC parts are from 2016 (6700k) with the exception of my 2080. Today I boot up my PC and there is an update. I opted into the windows preview with auto HDR about 3 months ago. To my surprise I am now running windows 11 without having any sort of TPM whatsoever. I'm actually glad I have the part coming because I don't know how long I'm going to be able to run it before windows realizes I don't have it but I think it is odd that I am running it now. So far it looks and runs great!
The official release in the fall will require it, but your CPU itself is unsupported and will officially require falling back to Windows 10. It's unclear at this time whether you'll need to do a fresh install to downgrade, or if there'll be an easy unofficial workaround anyway.
If you didn't read the above section of my post, while they may extend support to 7th gen Intel CPUs, it's unlikely they'll go down to your 6th gen chip.
Need to boot into BIOS to enable TPM but my SSD is so fast my wireless keyboard can't connect quickly enough to do it...
I don't own any other keyboards and don't feel like buying a wired one just for this.
I am big dumb. Any way around this?
Look into the software for your MB if there is an option to restart to BIOS/UEFI.
Does your motherboard manufacturer have a "boot into BIOS" or similar application? I use an Asrock one any time I need to tinker, and I don't even need to jam on a keyboard key to do so.
This is literally a native Windows 10 feature.
Settings>Update and Recovery>Recovery>Advanced Startup>Troubleshooting>UEFI Boot
