New antenna, no more cooling pad, single-core A5 chip

Mar 20, 2012 17:01 GMT  ·  By

After tearing down the new iPad, the technically savvy bunch at iFixit got their hands on a third-generation Apple TV to do more surgery.

They popped open the small black box to find that “Apple added [a] new antenna to address complaints about range and signal strength,” and that the new hardware doesn’t rely on a thermal cooling pad, which means the custom-designed A5 chip isn’t working overtime, even though it’s now required to output video at 1080p.

Speaking of chips, the teardown revealed that the A5 is a single-core processor, as well as the following details about the rest of them:

- Hynix H9TKNNN4K 512MB RAM stacked within the A5 - Toshiba THGVX1G6D2HLA01 8GB NAND Flash - Broadcomm BCM4330 (the same as the iPad 3rd Generation) - SMSC LAN9730 standalone USB to ethernet controller.