Despite Microsoft’s push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant’s latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.
This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.
The TPM is not a dedicated cryptographic processor, it’s an external keystore with a few select functions. You’re thinking of an HSM which is used almost exclusively in servers that have to handle thousands of secrets per second.
CPUs have had dedicated AES hardware for decades which is why LUKS and Bitlocler use it by default.
The TPM just allows certain keys and secrets to be generated and stored physically separate from the CPU as a security measure.
Bitlocker and LUKS will store a master key in the TPM so that you don’t have to enter a password every time you boot. They retrieve it from the TPM and then use it to unlock the actual encryption key which is done entirely in the CPU. If the TPM detects foul play such as secure boot alteration, it will refuse to give the key or clear itself.
Using the TPM for constant encryption like at rest disk encryption would be way too slow.
It’s so so small that most modern TPMs have been integrated into the CPU or even simulated via the motherboard firmware (fTPM and PTT).