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> they often ship earlier permutations of for years in mainstream products (see: M1). I still get a kick out of the ARM transition happening laregely in public
by runjake 3y ago
> they often ship earlier permutations of for years in mainstream products (see: M1).
I still get a kick out of the ARM transition happening laregely in public with the T2-chip Intel Macs. Vast majorities of a T2 system ran off the ARM-based T2 for its ISA.
- whynotminot 3y agoDo you have any further reading to provide about what all the T2 was doing in those Macs? I too have long suspected that the T2 was Apple playing with transition right in front of us, but would love a more comprehensive look at what all that chip was doing. I know it was providing the Secure Enclave, some hardware encode/decode media blocks, and I think FileVault for the SSD. But would be curious to know if it was even more than that.
- dwaite 3y agosecure storage/secure boot while acting as the SSD controller, crypto functions via the Secure Enclave with TouchID processing. Video codec for encoding/decoding H.264/H.265. Also handled the hardware for the microphone/speakers, camera, light sensors so that these would be isolated from the main OS. It handled Hey Siri voice command recognition. It also had independent power/sleep levels from the rest of the system, and handled power/thermal management from what I understand. Probably because it didn't operate as the NIC, they didn't move system/application background tasks like watching for push notifications or checking email.
- zaptrem 3y agoDidn’t it also power the Touch Bar which was technically a whole separate computer? I remember people booting other OSes on it.
- philistine 3y agoYup. It did. To me the transition happened in front of our eyes because the T2 chip was Apple stopping development of new hardware features on Intel. All that came to T2 could have been done on Intel but Apple was already committed to the switch so they started the work early and made it so they didn’t have to do it twice.
- astrange 3y agoARM Macs and T2 Macs aren't really at all architecturally similar and I don't think it helped any. It was probably a distraction.
- LoganDark 3y agoWasn't T2 the first "Apple silicon" to make its way into a Mac? AFAIK, the SMC and other stuff are just third-party chips with Apple firmware, but T2 is full custom silicon.
- astrange 3y agoThere were custom things like display controllers before, and third party chips often had features added for Apple. (Much of Intel's new features and power work were for Macs.)
- dagmx 3y agoThe T2 is a variant of the A10, so they definitely share some lineage with the M series Mac.
- astrange 3y agoThere's a lot more to a computer than whether it has a certain kind of CPU somewhere in it. In this case they're not running the same software or connected to the same things.
- arcticbull 3y agoApple ships and has shipped ARMs in everything. Dozens of them. If I had to pick an ancestor it would just be A-series chips in iPhones and iPads.