

Amazon Kindle Fire Teardown - zeratul
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon-Kindle-Fire-Teardown/7099/1

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baddox
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.

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kitcar
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 -

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icco
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.

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kvermeer
I believe that it's in this combination guide:

<http://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.

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antonyme
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.

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ugh
You are thinking of iSuppli: They do the BOM cost estimates. iFixIt only does
tear downs. Easy to confuse, I know.

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antonyme
Ah, yes - thank you, that's who I was thinking of.

iFixit are a fine mob indeed!

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olihb
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)...

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semenko
Yep -- this is referred to as Package on Package (PoP).

See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_on_package>

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joezydeco
Wow, is there _anyone_ using Freescale's iMX SoC anymore? TI is cleaning up in
the non-iOS market.

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tesseract
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.

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joezydeco
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.

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tesseract
Those aren't exactly comparable devices to the Kindle Fire. And the i.MX5 is a
relatively new device as far as I know.

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joezydeco
Is the Color Nook comparable? How about the Galaxy Tab 7?

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.

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tesseract
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.

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joezydeco
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.

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ww520
Anyone rooted the Fire yet? Ssh into it?

