Apple strictly bought MLC drives from Samsung. And the NVMe drives all used the same controllers as the Samsung "PRO" line (UAX, UBX, Polaris), except for some of the iMac Fusion Drives which used the smaller Photon controller paired with MLC NAND. Apple does charge a ton of money for their products, but they rarely cheap out on the components.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Replaces Last Remaining Intel-Made Component in M2 MacBook Air
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If those increases happen without any change to the transistor size, that would be pretty amazing. I imagine bottlenecks in other components would become clearer first, though - like we see with the M2 MBP.
Samsung Electronics and Samsung's foundry are run as their own branches of the company. Samsung is too big for a rivalry to include the entire company. Samsung Electronics doesn't even have first dibs on their own foundry.
If you're using USB 3.2 devices, you get full performance. It's only when using USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices that they operate at half speed. I don't know if I'd call that gimped, the further into the future, the less likely you will run into the limitation.
Also, we don't have a lot of information to go on when it comes to competitors in this area - nobody's scrutinizing their hardware to the same degree. For all we know, this is a limitation in USB itself. Or Thunderbolt 4. It's one of the most confusing things I have ever looked into, and it really wouldn't be if the USB foundation knew what numbers meant.
Obviously, Apple (like Intel did before them) can always 'throw more cores at the problem' and get better performance. That's a given. Buy a Mac pro for a gazillion dollars and you'll get a gazillion cores and have amazing performance.
I'm talking more about the single core performance, which is where the M1 really kicked ass vs. intel. They won't have that kind of leap in single core for a very long time IMHO.
And it's that single core performance that will have a much bigger impact on the consumer level macs that only have 8 or 10 cores total.
Last edited:
fantastic, tell it to the guy i quoted. but also, pretty sure the ssd in my mbp is from hynix and my air has toshiba.
We went a decade without knowing about core Intel, on chip, defects and Apple is much more secretive than Intel ever was. When have you even heard Apple admit to core defects. Let me answer that, never! For all we know each chip has a special mode just for the NSA to protect the children.
No chip is defect free, ever. So what makes you think Apple's M2 is?
For me, at least, the performance gains weren't the issue. The issue was how sporadic and inconsistent those updates were.
I never said it was or was not defect free.
You said it had issues, so I asked what they were. What are they?
Funny that the iFixit grifters spotted this, but missed the passive cooling system.
If you scroll back up, you'll see that I already did
And I said that Apple strictly bought MLC drives from Samsung, not that they strictly bought Samsung drives. Apple also used NAND from SK hynix, Samsung, SanDisk (later acquired by Western Digital), and Toshiba (now Kioxia) with their own in-house developed controllers.
Yes and no. Moore's law is pretty much dead, however with the M3 we will see a dramatic performance increase because of the shift from 5 NM to 3 NM.
It will stay on 3 NM for a couple of generations, gaining those 12% performance increases you speak of. Then when it transitions to 2 NM we will see another dramatic performance increase.
Rinse and repeat.
Exactly, most of the gains in the M2 over M1 was by cheating and bumping up the clock frequency, a game that's been long dead, as it came to the end of its Moore's Law road due to the extra power draw and heat generated. Not exactly what you want in your fan-less MBA that's already suffering from throttling with the M1. What are they going to do, bump up the clock frequency by 10% every iteration? Yeah, nah, that ain't happening.
The huge gains the M1 achieved was by using ARM's RISC architecture, rather than x86's CISC architecture. Which was done simply by extending the A-series chips, of course, they didn't have to re-invent the wheel.
Mind you, due to the success of M1, MS is has massively ramped up its ARM Windows development, and every chip company has massively ramped up their ARM chip development.
Intel also had a recent major clean out of its management, starting with the CEO, due to Intel's poor performance. I suspect we will see them catch up to some degree.
I'm all for it. Healthy competition is the only thing that will keep Apple honest.
Are you saying AMD has Thunderbolt support without intel chips? can you share details
… and on the MacBook Air packaging is a sticker reading „intel outside“??
In the M2 MacBook Air, Apple has replaced an Intel-made component responsible for controlling the USB and Thunderbolt ports with a custom-made controller, meaning the last remnants of Intel are now fully out of the latest Mac.
Earlier this month, the repair website iFixit shared a teardown of the new MacBook Air, revealing a look inside the completely redesigned machine. One subtle detail that went largely unnoticed was that unlike previous Macs, the latest MacBook Air introduces custom-made controllers for the USB and Thunderbolt ports.
iFixit mentioned it in their report, noting they located a "seemingly Apple-made Thunderbolt 3 driver, instead of the Intel chips we're familiar with." The new component was shared on Twitter earlier today, where it received more attention.
Few details are known about the controllers, including whether they're custom-made by Apple or a third party. In May 2021, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple planned to "replace the last remaining Intel part with an in-house version. Apple's current M1 Macs still use an Intel component known as a USB Retimer, which helps power the USB-C and Thunderbolt ports on its computer."
Article Link: Apple Replaces Last Remaining Intel-Made Component in M2 MacBook Air
The AMD Ryzen 6000 Mobile APUs include integrated USB4 with support for Thunderbolt interoperability. If an OEM so chooses, they can implement a Thunderbolt 4 compliant device based on one of these APUs, agree to Intel's licensing agreements, pay the necessary fees, perform the required testing, and receive Thunderbolt 4 certification for their product. 5 of the top 6 PC OEMs (i.e. Lenovo, HP, Dell, ASUS, and Acer) have adopted Kandou USB4 retimers instead of Intel's for some of their products. It's a pretty safe bet that Kandou's retimers are less expensive than Intel's. Apparently Kandou retimers have been spotted in laptops with AMD Ryzen 6000 Mobile APUs. Thus AMD can support Thunderbolt sans Intel chips.
I think lack of Wi-Fi 6E is a more likely explanation. Note that the M2 entries are both right around the 802.11ax average for transmit and slightly above average for receive.
The M2 MacBooks use extremely low power Broadcom based Wi-Fi / Bluetooth modules that only support two spatial streams and a maximum channel width of 20 MHz in the 2.4 GHz band and 80 MHz in the 5 GHz band. There is no 6 GHz (Wi-Fi 6E) support, no 160 MHz channel support in the 5 GHz band, and no 40 MHz support in the 2.4 GHz band.
Apple certainly doesn't need Intel to make their Wi-Fi faster, and I'm guessing they'd rather not go with Qualcomm either. There are some pretty significant issues with managing coexistence on the 6 GHz band, so Apple may not be in any particular hurry to adopt Wi-Fi 6E anyway.
Apple uses broadcom modems. They are okay but not the best. Intel has the best wifi modems for now
Before the transition, not at all, lots of forum members wanted to give amd a shot instead of moving to in house chips. Not only because of performance but also for compatibility.
After the M1 was introduced, I’m afraid not many people are in your camp. Still it would be nice to have bootcamp. Maybe when the alleged Windows-Qualcomm exclusivity arrangement ends?
Great to know though it does not make any noticeable difference in the usage of a Mac!