What Is Apple Fabric? Does My Mac Use Nand Flash?

I found this article:

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/06/explainer-chipsets-and-fabric/

Basically, Apple uses the term Fabric to refer to the parts of the System-on-Chip that carry out auxillary functions that – for an Intel or AMD CPU – would be handled by a separate motherboard chipset matched to the CPU. They might also be using the term to refer to inter-connections, especially for moving data between the SoC and RAM, or for moving data between two Max SoCs joined back-to-back to form an Ultra processor.

Apple Fabric is just the term used for the high speed bus/lanes with Apple Silicon. Newer CPUs of all varieties have high speed connections internally, but are now being extended outside of the CPU to connect various high speed items directly to the CPU such a GPU, Memory, SSD, and even some external items like Thunderbolt & USB. Different CPUs will have their own term for these high speed connections and may even change with later CPU models from the same company as technology changes.

With the older Intel Macs, these "external" to the CPU direct connections was usually just the industry standard PCIe bus which connected these various items.

Short answer: it is just a high speed connection for the CPU to allow access to some other high speed components.

I could be mistaken – but I believe that on all Apple Silicon based Macs to date, the M1-series or M2-series SoC performs some of the functions that would normally be carried out by the controller on a 2.5" SATA SSD or on a M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.

The Apple Silicon chips also encrypt the contents of internal SSDs in real-time. When you go to sell or trade in your computer, I believe there is now a menu option in macOS to help you "erase" your machine. I think what it does is to cause the machine to forget its old decryption key – so that even though the old data is still stored on the flash chips, it's now so much garbage to anyone short of maybe the NSA or KGB.

The "Connection: Apple Fabric" may simply be Apple's way of indicating that this is an internal SSD, and that the connection between the computer and the SSD is over Apple Fabric (the part of the SoC that replaces a chipset) rather than over a SATA interface; or an external interface like USB or Thunderbolt.

Where do you see ‽

Which exact Mac do you have. Apple logo at top left>About this Mac…