What's inside the Apple TV?
(Updated on 3/23/07@10:15 a.m.) What’s on Apple TV? Apparently chips from well-known makers, including Intel, Nvidia, Broadcom and Silicon Image.
I’m always interested in what is inside new products like the Apple TV. Luckily I'm not the only one. Apple TV teardowns by the Techrestore FutureShock blog (Link: here) and AnandTech (Link: here), reveal all of the hardware inside the device. It's no surprise that the $299 Apple TV, which started shipping earlier this week, incorporates an Intel processor. Intel has said the Apple TV uses a derivative of its Pentium M notebook chip. Although Intel has not said how fast it is, the processor chip likely runs in the 800MHz to 1GHz range. Anand believes it to be an Ultra Low Voltage Pentium M, a chip which is available at up to 1GHz.
The two teardowns also revealed that Apple has used a Fujitsu notebook hard drive, communications chips from Broadcom and an Nvidia graphics processor. The Broadcom chip, located on a communications module daughter card, appears to handle the Apple TV’s Wi-Fi networking. The Nvidia chip, located on its motherboard, is identified as a GeForce 7300 Go by Anand. The chip, offered by Nvidia as a mid-range processor for lighter notebooks, is advertised as being capable of gaming by the chipmaker. But in the Apple TV, it's there to handle graphics and possibly video encode/decode, as Anand points out. A version of Intel's 945 chipset handles I/O and other chipset functions, his teardown analysis says. A Silicon Image chip drives the Apple TV’s display interface. It’s possible that Apple uses some parts, such as the hard drive and or wireless daughter cards, interchangeably and that Fujitsu and Broadcom may not be the only suppliers for those respective components. However, that's of little importance to Apple TV users so long as they're happy with its performance.
What's most interesting from viewing these two teardowns is that, given the sum of its parts, the Apple TV could do a lot more than simply store and then relay videos to a television. Inside, it's got the heart of a fully-fledged miniature PC. A personal computer that is.