For some reason, the cleanness and crispness of their photographs always prompts me to look through all their galleries, even though I'm not very interested in the guts of a Kindle Fire.
It's all in the lighting - specifically, having a "light tent". There are lots of DIY light tent instructions available via Google if you want to try to reproduce the effect -
Just FYI, while I agree that it is all in the lighting, as of March of 2011, iFixit did not use a light tent. I don't work there anymore, but when I did, most of iFixit's lighting equipment could be bought from Home Depot. I thought there was a blog article on the setup, but I can't seem to find it.
I hope people take any BOM costs that might come up with a huge grain of salt. The hardware component costs are only one part of the costs of getting a complex product such as this to market.
The way people repeat these iFixit teardown costs as net costs and imply that there is a huge margin is utterly misleading (as has happened with various iProducts in the past).
These tear downs are useful and nicely done though - a great resource.
That's exactly what gross margin is for. The number itself is arbitrary; people are only interested in it so that they can compare against other products from the same company.
I don't think the iMX was ever targeted at smartphones or smartphone-ish tablets. And as far as I am aware it's still in things like digital photo frames, appliances, automotive infotainment, and other applications where it's nice to have Linux driving a big color TFT, but there's not a big demand for processing power.
The first Kindle, Sony Reader, and Microsoft Zune (AKA Toshiba Gigabeat) were i.MX designs. The i.MX5 series has the same ARM Cortex-A8 core as the OMAP3 and Apple A4. Processing power isn't the factor here, but OMAP definitely is easier to fit into a design with the stacked RAM.
Isn't the color Nook OMAP based? And as I recall, the Galaxy Tab has a Hummingbird.
I think we're talking past each other a bit. I know that Freescale has some newish parts that they are marketing for tablets. I saw one of their reference designs at a conference recently too. But as far as I know, no one has shipped a device intended to directly compete with the iPad (which is what a "tablet" seems to be basically understood as these days) based on a Freescale SoC. So it doesn't exactly seem to me that Freescale is losing share in that area - rather, that they have not yet broken into that particular market at all. What I was trying to say is that historically the i.MX have been lower end parts that were designed into different kinds of applications, and as far as I know, they are still doing OK in those markets. (The current generation of e-ink Kindles do have i.MX SoCs, for one thing.)
Incidentally my understanding is that the Kindle Fire was done by the same ODM as the Blackberry Playbook and that they're fairly similar in terms of the component selection. Makes sense that the ODM would go with parts they're familiar with.
Sure, historically iMX was winning in those low-end markets. I think Freescale still has a large footprint in automotive thanks to Motorola's history of doing automotive-grade components and related parts (airbag accelerometers, etc). The early iMX parts were decendents of Dragonball.
I would think Freescale really wants a high-visibility design win in the multimedia tablet/eBook market. You don't put all that CPU power and media acceleration on the die for nothing. My original point is that TI is capturing all of these wins for some reason over Freescale. I'm curious to know what the advantage is.
TI is silently creeping up on quite a number of sub-markets. Thankfully it mostly seems to be because they are simply making rather high-quality offerings.
This is crazy, the CPU is under the RAM chip (step 9). Is this kind of layout frequent? I guess you can't have a high power (and high heat dissipation)...
You can still sink a lot of heat under the chip through the PCB, and you can still put a thermal sink on top. But yeah, these packages need to run pretty cool. This particular CPU runs at 1.8V now.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadhttp://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing-A-Guitar-String/718/1
It looks like "Use two lamps on the object, one on each side." is the recommended lighting scheme. A light tent would certainly be an asset.
The way people repeat these iFixit teardown costs as net costs and imply that there is a huge margin is utterly misleading (as has happened with various iProducts in the past).
These tear downs are useful and nicely done though - a great resource.
iFixit are a fine mob indeed!
http://infinitybladegame.com/
http://firemint.com/real-racing-2-hd-home/
The i.MX5 and OMAP4 were both announced in early 2010. Here's someone showing a tablet reference design with the chip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUk296efZE8
As for running Linux, I've had a usuable mx51 reference board running Ubuntu on my desk for over a year now. It's driving a 21" HDMI monitor.
I think we're talking past each other a bit. I know that Freescale has some newish parts that they are marketing for tablets. I saw one of their reference designs at a conference recently too. But as far as I know, no one has shipped a device intended to directly compete with the iPad (which is what a "tablet" seems to be basically understood as these days) based on a Freescale SoC. So it doesn't exactly seem to me that Freescale is losing share in that area - rather, that they have not yet broken into that particular market at all. What I was trying to say is that historically the i.MX have been lower end parts that were designed into different kinds of applications, and as far as I know, they are still doing OK in those markets. (The current generation of e-ink Kindles do have i.MX SoCs, for one thing.)
Incidentally my understanding is that the Kindle Fire was done by the same ODM as the Blackberry Playbook and that they're fairly similar in terms of the component selection. Makes sense that the ODM would go with parts they're familiar with.
I would think Freescale really wants a high-visibility design win in the multimedia tablet/eBook market. You don't put all that CPU power and media acceleration on the die for nothing. My original point is that TI is capturing all of these wins for some reason over Freescale. I'm curious to know what the advantage is.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_on_package