Its likely there aren't any win 10 drivers for the laptops themselves. That is what meant by dropping support. Installing win 10 on them would be painful but I am sure some will try.
Desktop not likely to see NPU for a few years. This is just like secure boot/tpm... they showed up in Windows requirements for laptops 5 years before windows 11 suddenly wanted Desktop to have them. Hardware with the features has to exist before you can start demanding it. Hardware makers need to pull finger out.
The difference being that the feature was available in hardware and the pathway set long before it was a hard-set requirement/cutoff. While it's not fully detailed by this piece or others out there, if this is another hard-set cutoff, it means putting the cart well before the horse. The option to install Win 10 but at the cost of giving up these features for the time-being to be enabled later seems like a far better model than requiring Win11 for all situations.
There should be an option like there is for Meteor Lake and Win10 to essentially hide the NPU. It doesn't seem as difficult as it's being made to look.
https://downloadmirror.intel.com/794834/NPU_Win_Release_Notes_31.0.100.1688.pdf
I understand not wanting to waste resources on optimizing/activating for W10, but if disabled under W10 then it also doesn't need those resources.
For business buyers this becomes an issue especially considering the glacial pace of vendor certifications. I would much rather be able to buy a bunch of laptops that I can run on Win10 with 9/10ths of their features, that I can enable in the future at 10/10ths when WE are ready.
It's easy when it's a single user with maybe coupla PCs (especially with dual/multi-booting), but it's a lot harder to manage when you're already cutoff from the high-end by TPM and then cut-off on the low-end by this. but the hardware is distributed over many offices/cities.
It's also hard to make decisions on this when the utility and limitations of these new AiPCs won't be know for weeks, delaying buying decisions until weeks after that.
Okay, so I over generalised, but NPU that can run Co Pilot aren't in thhe wild from AMD yet. There are/were ones released before now, that don't qualify. I forgot about those.
Well, we still don't know for sure if the old one can't qualify yet considering nV's claim of M$ working with them to make CoPilot+ work on their GPUs (as CoPilot*RT or whatever). I doubt much will come of it, but there's even a discussion seems like that hard-limit is possibly 'flexible'.
If there's a way to make it work for that outlier case, it seems like M$ or AMD should be able to get Win10 to run on a StrixPoint/SPHalo, even if it requires disabling the visibility of the NPU in bios/software, similar to intel's solution above.
Seems like a miss, even though it's being sold as a need/win.
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