On January 15th, Apple Insiders reported some information regarding the hardware inside the Apple TV. We investigated further, and obtained information from an Asian source who had the pre production sample in his hands. We consider information reliable enough to publish them:
- the processor is a ULV Pentium M Dothan featuring 2MB of L2 cache on a 400MHs FSB. This CPU is not as powerful as the Core Duo, however, it is more than enough for what is required, the key point here being heat release as low as possible, price wise, ULV Dothan are much cheaper than ULV Core Duo Yonah.
- the chipset should be a Mobile Intel 915PM Express, so without an integrated graphic processor.
- The GPU will be a NVidia GeForce Go 7300 (G72M-V), connected via a PCI Express bus and featuring 64MB of VRAM. This GPU supports the Turbo Cache function, and H.254 hardware decoding.
- The HD is a 2.5" with 40GB capacity, and again for maintaining low power consumption, it is an ATA format and not a SATA.
- Video output is controlled by a dedicated chips, the Silicon Image SiI1930. It supports the HDMI 1.1 as well as HDCP. All HD video resolutions can be displayed, and audio over 8 channels at 192 kHz is supported too.
Officially, Apple TV does not support 1080p HD video, while component are in theory able to do so. It might be linked to a lack of CPU power, or a marketing strategy aiming to offer a 1080p ready Apple TV later in the year.
Of course, the Apple TV is very similar to a Mac Intel mini, and one can bet that its OS is a dedicated OSX Tiger or Leopard.
