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Taking Apart An Airport Extreme Base Station
Farley Mullet writes "As seen on MacSlash, here is a link to page documenting one man's dissection of an Airport Extreme Base Station. It's pretty neat to see what Apple crammed in there, including (gasp!) a chip from AMD!"
The form factor is different (notch in a different position) so it would be impossible. I did put a miniPCI Wireless-G card in my laptop, however.
a lW irelessProject
http://www.amphiskios.net/wiki/index.php?Intern
Check it out, it's pretty easy. If you disassemble the router instead of the PCI card you don't have to solder an antenna connector.
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http://www.amphiskios.net
You wouldn't have to buy the entire Airport base station. Apple sells Mini-PCI Airport Extreme cards seperately for 99$ at the Apple store here. However, it is questionable whether there are any drivers for non-Mac systems.
Actually from my recollection it is quite the other way around. AMD started out making a myriad of devices and then shifted focus to the desktop processor industry.
In other terms, they were running around town at night but lately they have settled down. Bully for them, I dig it.
The SCSI controller in my Quadra 840AV is by AMD.
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"Every good mechanic finishes up with parts left over."
The copyright is 2000. The 0252 suggests that the chip was made late in 2002 and the 0309 may mean it was packaged this year.
"Made in Taiwan"
It actually says "Assembled in Taiwan", so the chip itself was likely fabbed elsewhere.
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I actually am working on an embedded project that uses the Alchemy AU1500 chip, as used in the AirPort. I can tell you that getting Linux running on this AirPort would be trivial. All you need to do is break out the EJTAG pins on the AU1500, and connect it to a Raven EJTAG adapter (works under Linux + GDB).
The next thing you'd need to figure out are the SDRAM and flash timings.
What I would really like to see: someone should get Linux running out of the connected RAM, and then extract the contents of the Flash chip. I'm really curious what OS the AirPort uses. If it's something we're familiar with, then it might be easy to reverse engineer the driver for the BroadCom peripheral. I would *LOVE* to see drivers for these BroadCom devices.
The AU1500 has excellent support and is a superb microcontroller; take at www.linux-mips.org . Integrated USB, Ethernet, serial, very fun! If someone wants to send me an AirPort, I'll put Linux on it ! :)
The Mini-PCI card is based on a Broadcom 11g chipset. Broadcom already has Linux drivers for this chip, but they aren't open source. They are licensed to embedded designers for binary distribution and they aren't available to the general public. This is the same chipset that the Linksys WMP54g pci card uses.
FWIW, Apple have been using AMD chips through their machines for quite a while. I have dozens of older macs, from early powermacs back through quadras and mac II machines, and there are several AMD chips on some of those boards. They're not doing anything but auxiliary functions such as serial port controllers and the like, but they're there all the same
okay granted but in general the UK plugs are solid as a rock. also I have many euro plugs that are slightly different widths, some almost 1mm thicker than others. this matches the points in my current house well, as many of the sockets seem to have been installed in the dark ages and they too vary slightly in width. making some plugs so flimsy they just fall out of their own accord, and some so tight you can not get the plug in there without a hammer. i am yet to have a UK plug fall out, or be impossible to plug in.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
We're not afraid to do that either, but the outlets have to be of a specific type, isolated with internal transformers to step down the voltage, and mounted in a certain way, up high, away from any water. Added to this is the fact that all UK appliances are fused and virtually all are grounded. The large 3rd pin on uk mains plugs is the earth and all uk plugs have an internal fuse rated to match the appliance ( untill the owner changes it for the wrong rating, but there only so much you can do ).
So in the case of your hair dryer not only would it be grounded to prevent an electric shock, but the fuse in the plug would blow cutting off the supply without fusing the entire house's electrics.
The reason that the american, and other flat 2 pin plugs, tend to fall out easily is the way they are retained. The holes in the pins are for a sprung copper contact wiper inside the socket that has a detent bump moulded into it to match the hole, providing a away for the plug to be retained. Over time the wipers lose their spring and the detent becomes less and less effective, allowing the plug to fall out easily.
The Aiport in the article is actually the second generation Airport, and the second to use an AMD CPU.
The original Aiport used an AMD Elan SC400 i486 based processor and a Lucent Wavelan Silver PC card.
The second generation Airport "Snow" used a Motorola Power PC 860 processor and Apple's own proprietary (Cisco derived IIRC) Wifi radio on a Cardbus card
This newest Airport switches to the MIPS based AMD CPU, does away with the the cardbus interface all together, and has the latest proprietary radio card including 802.11g on a mini PCI bus.
I've seen those for years in Macs, same with NEC, TI, etc. Apple have often used AMD chips for their ethernet controllers on previous PowerMacs. There were AMD chips on some Quadra logic boards. Nothing new here or surprising, really.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
$400 is two week's pay (take home) for some of us technicians though. If you live on your own or with a roomate it can take months to save $400 up.
I just saved up for a month and got a Pentium III 1Ghz CPU for $90, now I have to rummage the house for spare change to get gas to go to work.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I believe AMD was (and still is) one of the top flash memory vendors around. (Intel happens to be too...)
As someone else said, AMD started in other markets. CPUs are something "new" to them. Even if AMD gets creamed in the CPU market for a few years, they'll still be around. It's not like 3Dfx who had nothing to fall back on other than their 3D accelerator chips - x86 CPUs are just one part of AMD's business, they're involved in a LOT of other areas and always have been, even before they made CPUs.
Even if Apple and AMD were intense competitors, I wouldn't be that surprised to see an AMD chip in an Apple product. Sometimes using the best chip for a job involves buying from your competitor. This was the case with Lucent Microelectronics - Some of their largest customers were intense competitors of theirs in the optical networking business. (Such as Cisco). This was eventually one of the main reasons for spinning the microelectronics division off into Agere. Many years ago I saw a Lucent FPGA on a telephone interface board in a Nortel product. At that time, Lucent was one of the top FPGA and DSP vendors in the world.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?