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IChing
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From the article:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050727-5141.html
It seems that some Sharp sales reps are bragging to potential customers that Apple will be using the Sharp LH7A400 SOC (system on a chip) in the initial version of the video iPod. According to Sharp's product page, the LH7A400 contains the following hardware integrated into one low-power package:
ARM922T 32-bit RISC CPU @ 200MHz, 8K instruction cache/8K data cache, MMU
32-bit external data bus
Internal SRAM
SDRAM controller
Color/Grayscale LCD controller
USB 2.0 Full Speed Device
Multiple UARTs
IrDA
Synchronous serial port
I2C or SMBus
GPIO
Audio CODEC and AC97 Interface
MMC, Smart Card, and PCMCIA/CF support
The chip runs at 1.8V core voltage, sits in a 256-pin PBGA package, and has more than enough muscle to do video playback. In fact, I hear that a roughly iPod-sized engineering sample based on the chip is being shown decoding MPEG4, MP3, and JPEG to a 4:3 aspect ratio color TFT.
If the video iPod is coming this Fall, then Apple would've been working on the product long before they announced the switch to Intel hardware. And by all accounts, the final Intel decision was made at the last minute before the announcement. So Apple would have had to start the video iPod design process with a third-party ARM SOC like the Sharp device named above, even if they now plan to move the device to XScale eventually.
It seems that some Sharp sales reps are bragging to potential customers that Apple will be using the Sharp LH7A400 SOC (system on a chip) in the initial version of the video iPod. According to Sharp's product page, the LH7A400 contains the following hardware integrated into one low-power package:
ARM922T 32-bit RISC CPU @ 200MHz, 8K instruction cache/8K data cache, MMU
32-bit external data bus
Internal SRAM
SDRAM controller
Color/Grayscale LCD controller
USB 2.0 Full Speed Device
Multiple UARTs
IrDA
Synchronous serial port
I2C or SMBus
GPIO
Audio CODEC and AC97 Interface
MMC, Smart Card, and PCMCIA/CF support
The chip runs at 1.8V core voltage, sits in a 256-pin PBGA package, and has more than enough muscle to do video playback. In fact, I hear that a roughly iPod-sized engineering sample based on the chip is being shown decoding MPEG4, MP3, and JPEG to a 4:3 aspect ratio color TFT.
If the video iPod is coming this Fall, then Apple would've been working on the product long before they announced the switch to Intel hardware. And by all accounts, the final Intel decision was made at the last minute before the announcement. So Apple would have had to start the video iPod design process with a third-party ARM SOC like the Sharp device named above, even if they now plan to move the device to XScale eventually.
