https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...ed/windows-11-22h2-supported-intel-processors
Looks like Kaby Lake Refresh is now the oldest gen of Intel CPUs that is supported. It is pretty transparently artificial at this point (good old Wintel(+AMD) cartel) because what is the difference between the original KBL and KBL-R from the perspective of the OS? Yes, a KBL-R mobile i5 is a quad core but then they are still supporting old Celerons (I am not talking about the E-core-based ones), so it's not about the number of cores clearly. So my Latitude 7490 (which is my newest system) is right on the edge of what is currently supported. What are the chances it will be Comet Lake or Ice Lake for 23H2 or whatever the next major update will be?
Furthermore, I was planning to install 11 in a Hyper-V VM on my EliteBook (to work around the TPM 2.0 requirement, which the Excavator-based EliteBook may or may not meet, depending on whether mine has a dedicated Infineon TPM or only the PSP fTPM) but according to the MS website the VM host CPU still needs to meet the processor requirements (which the Excavator-based A10 does not, by quite a large margin)... I don't even see my old 1600 AF on the list (although the 2600 is on there), so I don't know if even my decommissioned X470 system would be able to run the latest Win 11.
At this point they are just making it unnecessarily hard for people to become familiar with their stuff because, honestly, I don't care about their BS requirements; I use Linux for personal use anyway, so they can get lost with regard to that. But for corporate IT (certainly entry level) you are in 90% of the cases expected to know Windows stuff. Yes, eventually I will build an Alder Lake (or similar) home lab, but that's $$$. It's really disgusting how corps are just relentlessly squeezing the common person in these times (and I am still better off than most).