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Your CPU should have a TPM built-in. It's most likely just disabled in the BIOS (it was often disabled by default on motherboard BIOSes in the pre-Windows 11 days). Have a look in the BIOS for something labeled fTPM or Firmware TPM.

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"You can only use our OS if you opt in to some malware that pre-empts the OS" - Microsoft having a normal one

On Ryzen, in particular with their use case (gaming), the fTPM was known to introduce issues. Lag spikes of some sort. I don't remember how or why, but there's a bit of a concert where this is concerned

I'm pretty sure it's fine now with updates applied...

I went and bought a discrete one since my platform was in a weird middle ground. New but not integrated

I thought every TPM has issues like that, because interaction with the TPM puts the CPU in System Management Mode to prevent the OS/application from performing timing attacks against the TPM. Or does that only apply to TPM 1.2?

I don't think there's any issues with TPM on recent CPUs/firmware, but people often misattribute random stutters from things like a bad over clocks to TPM. The old amd TPM stutters made games basically unplayable because it happened continuously

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