TPM, or Trusted Platform Module, provides hardware encryption in Windows 11. It seems that regardless of the implementation, manufacturers will need to go through Microsoft to disable the TPM requirement. It’s not clear if manufacturers can bypass the requirement beyond a special circumstance like the Windows 10 China Government Edition. China, for example, uses Windows 10 China Government Edition, which enables “the government to use its own encryption algorithms.” Lenovo is one of Microsoft’s OEM partners that delivers this special version of Windows. Certain countries have distinct versions of Windows with some features enabled and others disabled.

Relaxing the requirement for manufacturers makes sense. However, digging into the detailed system requirements reveals that manufacturers have a lot of flexibility with TPM.Īs discovered by Tom’s Hardware, page 16 of the Windows 11 hardware requirements says that “upon approval from Microsoft, systems for special purpose commercial systems, custom order, and customer systems with a custom image are not required to ship with a TPM support enabled.” A TPM is usually soldered to the motherboard, but add-on modules are available, too.

Originally, this seemed as a requirement mostly focused on manufacturers, as Microsoft has required TPM on Windows 10 for the past few years. Microsoft stirred up a lot of confusion following the Windows 11 announcement by listing TPM 2.0 as a requirement to run the operating system.

Windows 11 tpm requirement