Clarus

Soli said:

That is the best news I've heard and it's kind of pushing me toward updating my headless Mac mini that is connected to a large capacity RAID.

I should clarify that I am not sure how much the T2 helps with external drives. It might help somewhat, but maybe not as much as with the superfast internal storage.

My doubts come from what Apple says:

Data on the built-in, solid-state drive (SSD) is encrypted using a hardware-accelerated AES engine built into the T2 chip.

Apple specifically says built-in, but the tech note is not specific about how much T2 helps with external drives. I'd like to think that it is still faster, but it sounds like it may not be integrated quite as much with external drives. Has anyone measured this?

What I would like that to mean is that T2 hardware-accelerated encryption also benefits external drives (subject to their read/write speeds of course), but only the built-in storage is encrypted by default. Because FileVault on external drives still needs to be manually enabled.

wizard69 said:

The real problem  here is that the base operating frequency of 1.4GHz is crap.   Intel’s In ability to break my power usage down an honestly advance the clock rates of their chips is really hurting the industry.  The increase in single thread performance of these processors isn’t even worthy of discussion anymore.   

The 1.4GHz does not hurt anything. That's what the very article pointed out. The CPU averaged 2.7GHz, not 1.4, because the CPU is designed to give you whatever power your current applications ask for. The only reason it goes down to 1.4 is for a great benefit: If your computer isn't doing anything, the CPU can dial back further, which saves more battery power. Once you start giving it loads, Turbo Boost will let it go up as far as it can, as long as it can, until it gets too hot. You're not going to see 1.4GHz any time you are actively using the computer. Unless you're staring at the screen for 20 seconds because you haven't decided what to type or click on next; then it's probably when it will drop to 1.4. When you need it to do something, the CPU will spin up as needed. And that is exactly what you want it to do.

ericthehalfbee said:

I wonder if the addition of the T2 chip affects this. Encryption on the fly could be the reason for the reduced write speeds.

What you're wondering about is actually the opposite of what has happened.

On older Macs without the T2 chip, only one component can encrypt/decrypt: The CPU. If you need the CPU for something else, it can be tied up by encryption. I would encrypt hard drives and it would tell me how many hours it would take to finish. It was always quite a few hours.

On newer Macs with the T2 chip, encryption/decryption can be handed off to the T2 chip. This has resulted in fast background encryption plus zero load on the CPU, which no longer has to be concerned with encryption. With the T2 chip, volume encryption is basically painless now.

So the addition of the T2 chip did affect encryption. It made it much, much faster and easier!