MacBook Pro's Touch Bar related to Apple Watch


Ars Technica:

And developers who have dug into the software and documentation (particularly the tireless Steve Troughton-Smith, whose recent Twitter sabbatical made my feed much more boring) have confirmed that it has an ARMv7 CPU core and is actually running an offshoot of watchOS, all of which helps it interact with the rest of the Mac.

At any rate, the T1 is an interesting chip that does much more than support Touch ID and Apple Pay. Apple tells us that it has a built-in image signal processor (ISP) related to the ones Apple uses in iPhone and iPad SoCs, something which Troughton-Smith suggests could protect the camera from malware hijacking. And its Secure Enclave handles the encryption and storage of fingerprint data and protects it from the rest of the operating system and its apps, much as it does in iOS.

Essentially the T1 is an embedded iOS device inside the Mac. Also, while the graphics are drawn by the main Intel CPU/GPU, the T1 drives the Touch Bar's display.