> On most Macs, there are discrete controllers for audio, system management and disk drives. But the T2 handles all these taks. The T2 is responsible for controlling the iMac Pro’s stereo speakers, internal microphones, and dual cooling fans, all by itself.
Translation: T2 is a southbridge, but this time with a camera controller, and a TPM in addition to the normal disk, audio codec, peripheral bus, and GPIO functionality.
Came to say the same thing (or see if someone else said it). This looks like classic multiprocessing, and looks like computing, like music and clothing, is also subject to ~20-year fashion cycles for some things.
It does a bit more than a southbridge, but it does take over all of the functionality that was traditionally in the southbridge. It's more like a cellphone architecture where the CPU is a slave to the black box that actually boots the device.
This is exactly the sort of vendor lockdown/lockout on a PC that people have been warning us about since TPMs and signed bootloaders started appearing on cell phones.
Translation: T2 is a southbridge, but this time with a camera controller, and a TPM in addition to the normal disk, audio codec, peripheral bus, and GPIO functionality.