Third iteration of Apple TV came to labs of iFixit, and as it fits - the experts tore it down. In the process, they revealed couple of very interesting points, such as the dual antenna design and the new, low-cost version of the A5 chip.
The targeted $99 price point left no doubt that the company will take a lot of cost-cutting measures, but we did not expect to see Apple spending 25 million dollars on taping out a single-core A5 chip. This is not a re-done A4 but rather a single-core A5 with the appropriate graphics processor. We expect that Apple haven't taped out another design from Samsung's fab in Austin, TX - but rather the company is achieving a near 100% yield (percentage of working chips) by disabling the second core on the fully fledged A5 chips which are powering the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.
The chip is paired with 512MB of LPDDR2 from Hynix and 8GB NAND Flash memory from Toshiba. Furthermore, hardware portion is improved by going with Broadcom 4330 chip and two antennas: dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz for seamless connectivity to 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi standards.
You can read the whole teardown here:
iFixit Apple TV 3rd Generation Teardown
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