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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!"
It says that the main processor is a mini-PCI card. Does that mean that it could resonably be put in a computer without the base station? My Dell Inspirion 8200 uses a mini-PCI card for wireless, and if I could possibly find drivers for it, i.e. for use in linux, that would be so cool. Imagine upgrading your laptop to 54 Mbps yourself (with no PCI card sticking out the side).
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
Slicing up an Apple just see what's inside.
Kinda seedy, if you ask me....
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
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.
That huge heat sink leads me to a good idea of why the 12" pBook is so hot.
And the AMD chips have been in the previous base stations as well. (or so I was told, when I posted this comment on macslash) But it does kind of clear up a great deal of speculation on what Apple and AMD were up to.
I posted this comment on macslash as an AC
AMD makes microcontrollers and all SORTS of different ICs. Gasp!
Also Texas Instruments doesn't just make calculators, either...
That's all folks! Despite the tinkering, the ABS still functions normally.
How many screws did you have left over at the end?
bash$
Publish on a web site that you are voiding their warranty by cracking their product open.
Thanks, though.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Does Airport really merit its own icon? I fear that we may be DILUTING the value of Slashdot subject icons! SLASHDOT EDITORS, REPENT!
Oh wait, who cares? Looks pretty nifty.
I just took apart my Mac LC & LCII. The both had AMD chips in them, not the processor, but some other chip was labeled with an AMD logo on it.
Also, for more WiFi info, these are some good links...
http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/wiki/?Apple
http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/WirelessLin ks
http://www.gulker.com/2002/10/10.html
I believe that most wireless access points are just PCMCIA wireless cards with some extra software and hardware controlling it, that's why prices of these are coming down so much.
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 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.
We've all been lied to. All these years apple has been telling us their products "just work" and here we find actual components- complicated components!- and in a simple device!
I don't know what's physically inside their full computer systems, but now for me they are filled only with lies.
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?
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
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
Well, kinda.
The project hasn't been updated in a couple of months, and it breaks Ethernet bridging, but the idea of running Linux on a sleek little gadget from Apple is still geeky enough to be interesting.
The Airport is great, but to configure it you need to be running OS 9 or X - horrid news for a high school that I was working at a few months ago. Every machine was running OS 8.6, including the one teacher-owned laptop. Every student-owned laptop was Windows-based.
I brought in my laptop (which runs Debian) and gave the Airport Base Station Configurator a try, but to no avail.
So - cool device, but it needs to be easier to configure or modify.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
... you've gotten to the core of the problem. It's very appeeling .... it will be interesting to see what results stem from this research.
Infuriate left and right
We all know it's truly the Gremlins running on the Gremlin wheels that make apple products go (or sprites if u have the sprite model)
This article is a falsification designed to bring about doubt among the ranks of the faithful! Do not stumble down the path of blasphemy!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Oh, wait.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
...so this guy buys an Apple Airport for his sister, gives it to her as a birthday present, then dismantles it with his handy-dandy toolkit?
Ah, there's nothing like the warm glow that comes from the giving of gifts.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
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?
Reverse engineering a product (or software) in and of itself is not a violation of the DMCA. Only reverse engineering for the purpose of "circumventing a technological measure" in defeating copyright protection is in violation.
In other words, feel free to open up a base station yourself -- just don't try to decrypt anything meant to protect copyright (I don't think anything meets this criteria inside a base station).
Yowzers, and didn't that title just set off every keyword monitor at the NSA.
I can actually envision some poor computer at the NSA literally having kittens.
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.