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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!"
I thought it was common knowledge that AMD is in bed with apple...
the dogs fight together against the wolf (intel)
AFAIK there was a AMD embedded 486 in the original AirPort, and Apple is working with AMD on HyperX pci or some such, and so on and so forth
Buttsex.
AMD makes microcontrollers and all SORTS of different ICs. Gasp!
Also Texas Instruments doesn't just make calculators, either...
The Apple Airport base stations seem to just work, unlike my experience with Dlink and Linksys products.
A comparable box is the Linksys WRT54G; looking through reviews, people have had lots of problems. You can get it for $120-130 compared to $190-$200 for the Airport; and the Linksys doesn't have a USB port for printer sharing.
A $60-$80 premium to have a solution which is dependable is well worth it for me.
Nice to see what's inside those. I was kind of expecting to see just a standard WiFi card in there, in the original base station, exactly like the one he had pictured for comparison, it was actually just a Lucent PCMCIA card. Apple likes to use the least weird parts, a nice break from the proprieatary RAM that they used to use. Maybe this explains what those talks with AMD were as well, just discussing AE design? Most likely. Maybe some HyperTransport in there, but definitely nothing about x86. I hope this little science experiment showed that to you crazies.
- Sherman
There's nothing particularly interesting or shocking about having an AMD chip in the Airport. Also, it's not any kind of i86 chip at all: "The CPU is a AMD Au1500 series RISC-based processor. It is based on the MIPS architecture." Moreover, it has a date of 2000 and "Made in Taiwan" on the chip itself, so what we have here is fairly old technology cranked out by a Taiwanese fab (UMC would be my guess). And absolutely no proof for the "Apple is moving to AMD" rumor. Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
AMD is the slut of microprocessor companies. They're making small deals left right and center, because that's the only way they have to dethrone Intel. By picking up the scraps
Say what? Name a microprocessor company that doesn't have a diverse line of semiconductor products. Hell IBM makes PPC chips, helps AMD with their production of Athlon chips, makes embedded chips, makes their own x86 clone, makes POWER chips, DACs, and lord knows what else as they're one of the largest fabs out there. Intel makes/made ethernet chips, 802.11 chips, ARM, bubble memory, x86, etc. Motorola makes chips for cell phones, embedded processors, PPC, 68k (coldfire et.al), DSP, etc. How on earth is AMD any different?
I don't know about you but those plugs never fall out of a wall socket. compare and contrast to the pissy little european two pin plugs, or even worse those very flimsy US two pin (easy-bend) plugs. The only thing that rivals it is the australian 3 pin power plugs but even they are prone to falling out from time to time. no for me the UK monster 3 pin plug is a great thing.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
The modern liberal is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for freeloading off of his countrymen.