NVIDIA and Intel power the Apple TV
Wednesday 28th March 2007, 05:57:00 PM, written by Arun
According to Anandtech's teardown of the Apple TV, as well as an analyst which had the good idea of doing the same, the products' components are very PC-like. Indeed, the primary parts are a 90nm NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 (G72) for rendering and video decoding acceleration, a 1GHz ULV Pentium M (Dothan) and Intel's Mobile 945G chipset.
In addition to that, Broadcom apparently won all the wireless chip contracts, and Marvell might also be responsible for some smaller things. As for memory, there's 256MiB of Nanya DDR2 and 64MiB of 700MHz Samsung GDDR3. Overall, all fairly cost-effective parts if the Apple TV was a PC; but it obviously isn't, so critics would argue that this is much less cost and power/heat-efficient than more traditional consumer electronics/embedded parts. On the other side of things, it does add a lot of flexibility to the software side of things for Apple.
In terms of what it means financially to the different companies involved, we would tend to agree with the analysts that claim Intel has the highest dollar content of the box and that NVIDIA has the second highest. It's hard for us to estimate the cost of the GDDR3 and that of the Broadcom chips, but we wouldn't be surprised if both cost slightly less than $10. As for the GeForce Go 7300 chip, the actual revenue contribution to NVIDIA for that should be lower than the analysts' claimed number of $20, and probably more in the range of $10-15.
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