Windows 11, the TPM2.0 requirement and Asus AMD chipset motherboards

Microsoft officially announced Windows 11 today. There was the usual online comparisons between the announced features and other comparable features in MacOS and Linux, like the centered Task Bar that now looks suspiciously like how MacOS’s Dock has looked for, well, years.

In the tech requirements though, there is an unusual detail – Windows 11 requires a motherboard security module called TPM 2.0. Most new motherboard apparently come with one of these, but Asus has produced a number of motherboards in the last couple of years and chose not to include one of these modules onboard. If you run the compatibility checker on a PC with one of these mobos, you’ll get this notification that your PC, that you most likely bought as recent as within the last couple of years, is not compatible with Windows 11:

Understandably, there’s a number of threads online where people are rather upset that the new PC they bought within the last few months is not compatible with Windows 11.

The good news is some AMD Ryzen chipsets have BIOS that includes embedded TPM 2.0 support, even if it’s not provided by a discrete module on the motherboard. On my Asus X570 Plus motherboard it has an fTPM option in the BIOS settings with two options, ‘discrete’ or ‘firmware’. On mine the default option was ‘discrete’ but changing it to ‘firmware’ added the support that the compatibility checker is looking for:

And now running the checker again, everything is good:

First quad core Android tablet from Asus announced, running latest nVidia Tegra 3 chipset

It had to happen sooner or later. Dual CPU cores for tablets are now officially yesterday. Say hello to quad core tabets running nVidia’s latest Tegra 3 chipset. The interesting thing about this latest version of the Tegra system-on-a-chip is that it will use 1 CPU for ‘normal’ processing, and then an additional 4 CPU cores step in when needed for heavy lifting.

Asus have an updated version of their EEE Transformer named the Transformer Prime which will be running on the Tegra 3 chipset and available by the end of this year starting at $500.