The Guts Of An iPod

The Infamous Grimace writes: "The folks at this Japanese web site have provided pics of the inside of an iPod. A quick breakdown of it in English is here. The FireWire contoller appears to be TIs TSB43AA82, the chip is PortalPlayers PP5002B w/ an ARM7TDMI-based core. Apparently it has encoding abilities as well. The hard-drive is Toshiba's MK5002MAL."

Comments

Re:It's great to have sites like this

[mcspock]

Linux is available for the arm7tdmi. This is different from the portal player processer, since portal player (iirc) has a dual core cpu. The second core lets them do mp3 encoding with, presumably, the standard ARM encoding library.

The funny part about "can it run linux" here is that the line is suddenly blurred. This device is $400, has a fast processor, 5gb hard drive, and 32mb of ram - much nicer features than your standard PDA. Additionally, it would be (relatively) straight forward to enable all the standard device features (read: mp3 playback) under linux.

Yep, an iPod will totally outclass any windows CE devices we are likely to see in the next few years.