Shen Ye, a senior executive at HTC Vive, has been tracking the prices of the TPM modules and has been posting it on his Twitter account. Initially, the price of these products was around 10 euros, but since the announcement of the system requirements for Windows 11 the price has doubled and currently it has already been placed at up to 100 euros, and that in the sites where there is stock.
No stock of TPM modules due to speculators
Thanks to Windows 11, people are scalping TPM2.0 modules as well now.
$ 24.90 ➡ $ 99.90 in just 12 hours pic.twitter.com/9TTHC2c47w
– Shen Ye (@shen) June 25, 2021
As always, resellers and speculators seek to make a killing every time a story like this comes to the fore, in which something is a “mandatory requirement” and especially when it comes to something as “rare” as a TPM module, in this regard Of which surely many buyers are misinformed and intend to buy it even if they do not need it since with a brief investigation of the configuration of their UEFI they will be able to find alternatives through firmware.
In any case, below is a screenshot of a machine based on a Ryzen 7 2700X processor, paired with a motherboard with an AMD B450 chipset (a 2018 platform) with its fTPM activated, so it meets the requirements Windows 11 despite the fact that with the information that some media are distributing, users may think not.
Windows 11 uses hardware TPMs for secure credential storage, no more, no less, and this fact brings us to the next question: is it reasonable to impose a requirement like this in the midst of a chip shortage crisis?
Should Microsoft remove the TPM requirement for Windows 11?
As we just mentioned, there are not a few who are complaining that Microsoft imposes a requirement like this in the midst of a shortage of chips. We are talking about the most used operating system in the world (Windows in general) and with this requirement, to begin with, its use is limited to modern platforms only, which means that there will be literally millions of PCs that will be forced to stay on Windows 10 and they will not be able to update.
On the other hand, it does not seem very smart to impose a hardware requirement in the midst of a shortage of chips, and this has been demonstrated because speculators are already trying to stockpile TPM modules with the aim of selling them more expensive later, as soon as there are no stock and users eager to upgrade to Windows 11 are in a rush.
In any case, we will see what all this leads to, since after all the TPM modules are very cheap to manufacture and it is normal that the stock has run out immediately precisely because as it was not a component that was in high demand, there was no a lot of stock. Now that there will be demand for this product, it is to be expected that manufacturers will begin to manufacture them as churros and that the stock (and the price) will be replenished soon, so sincerely, we believe that it is not something to worry about. this moment.
