Comment by mindcrash

It's not. Like TPM and several new CPU features are a hard requirement for Windows 11, which are patched out by tools like Rufus but can lead to a broken system with every single update you install, a NPU is a hard requirement for the upcoming major update with agentic AI.

They got a storm of criticism after that announcement, but Microsoft seemingly has not given a single fuck about that and has not backtracked on this decision.

(Just like they technically could have allowed Windows 11 to run on older PCs with some disabled features out of the box, but didn't)