Monday, 15 August 2011

Macs with AES-NI

Macs with AES-NI - green = yes, red = no. If your Mac is not on the list, then likely its no, as at 15 August 2011. Basically to have any chance you need Core i5 or i7.







With OSX 10.7 Lion having Full Desk Encryption (FileVault 2), and it being able to have hardware acceleration from CPUs that have AES-NI, you need to ask which CPUs in Apple Macs have AES-NI. Also useful if you use TruCrypt, which can use AES-NI. You can use TruCrypt to share encrypted drives / partitions between Macs and Windows - very useful if you use your office for off-site backup of home data.



Information compiled from www.everymac.com and ark.intel.com
Posted by at 02:37
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4 comments:

  1. Nathan Haug16 August 2011 at 09:08

    I know for a fact that the MacMini Server (2.0 GHz I7-2635QM) does NOT have AES-NI enabled, regardless of what Intel says. There's a common issue with this processor not having AES-NI because it looks like the manufacturer has to enable it on the processor.

    This article confirms the same thing for the 2.0 GHz MBP: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4205/the-macbook-pro-review-13-and-15-inch-2011-brings-sandy-bridge/2

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  2. Steve Mansfield16 August 2011 at 14:55

    huh, yes, strange, and if I'd got the quad-core Mini, very annoying!

    This Intel page says is does has AES-NI http://ark.intel.com/products/53463/Intel-Core-i7-2635QM-Processor-%286M-Cache-2_00-GHz%29

    ReplyDelete
  3. Steve Mansfield16 August 2011 at 15:00

    I also see that the 13" MBP 2011 is advertised on EveryMac as having i5-2415M, but on Anandtech as i5-2410M. Its really quite confusing - this is the Intel comparison page for them http://ark.intel.com/compare/53449,52224

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  4. Anonymous15 September 2011 at 10:01

    The MacBook Pro Core i7 2.0 15 Early 2011 did not have AES-NI enabled until EFI firmware version 2.2:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1450

    There's also a firmware update for the Mac Mini, released on the same day:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1449

    it probably enables AES-NI, but I don't have a Mac Mini to test.

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