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tipoo
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Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 12:04 pm

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+T ... down/97511

Image

That is
A) Some beefy cooling for a little streamer, and
2) Proves Thunderbolt 3 can work on ARM, with regard to in house mac CPUs...

I think Apple should pursue more game developers for this. Would people buy it as a console, no, but if they're going to get a high end streamer anyways, a nice microconsole would be a welcome bonus.
This is easily above the 7th gen and even the Switch in raw power, and the latter can run a recent AAA like Doom. The wand controller requirement is gone and they sell controllers in-store.
 
tipoo
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 12:48 pm

Hm, they may have gotten a bit too eager, I think that's actually just a regular ethernet adaptor that happens to sometimes go in Thunderbolt dongles.
 
SuperSpy
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 1:48 pm

I'd love to see that fan in motion, my guess is it's running at some hilariously slow RPM considering it's size and the fact that the whole unit is capped at like 15 watts of power by it's power supply.
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tipoo
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 1:51 pm

SuperSpy wrote:
I'd love to see that fan in motion, my guess is it's running at some hilariously slow RPM considering it's size and the fact that the whole unit is capped at like 15 watts of power by it's power supply.


It's a bit of an illusion, the outer rings seem to be an air baffle/channel instead, the inner part is the fan. The outer rings may be connected to the upper heatsink thermally.
 
ludi
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 2:03 pm

tipoo wrote:
SuperSpy wrote:
I'd love to see that fan in motion, my guess is it's running at some hilariously slow RPM considering it's size and the fact that the whole unit is capped at like 15 watts of power by it's power supply.


It's a bit of an illusion, the outer rings seem to be an air baffle/channel instead, the inner part is the fan. The outer rings may be connected to the upper heatsink thermally.

Yeah, I did a double-take also, until looking at the complete teardown pictures. The actual fan is about the size of a laptop fan (albeit higher quality by the look of it). The baffle piece is a large aluminum heatsink assembly, although I'm having trouble seeing how it pulls in fresh air.
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tipoo
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 2:22 pm

ludi wrote:
tipoo wrote:
SuperSpy wrote:
I'd love to see that fan in motion, my guess is it's running at some hilariously slow RPM considering it's size and the fact that the whole unit is capped at like 15 watts of power by it's power supply.


It's a bit of an illusion, the outer rings seem to be an air baffle/channel instead, the inner part is the fan. The outer rings may be connected to the upper heatsink thermally.

Yeah, I did a double-take also, until looking at the complete teardown pictures. The actual fan is about the size of a laptop fan (albeit higher quality by the look of it). The baffle piece is a large aluminum heatsink assembly, although I'm having trouble seeing how it pulls in fresh air.



The channels seem to go under the plastic fan housing, and the ends of the channels go to the slits on the bottom of the ATV unit.

Looks like the slits are both doing intake and exhaust then, not sure how efficient that is, but probably doesn't really matter for this kind of thing. Since the fan looks like it would be blowing air back out, probably just whatever new air trickles in from negative pressure?
 
tipoo
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 4:00 pm

Ahh now I get it, the channels only intake to part of the fan, so it's intaking from the upper part here, and exhausting thorough the lower part. The intake part flows up over the fan housing into the blade and out the exhaust part. So front to back cooling.


Image
 
LostCat
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 8:15 pm

tipoo wrote:
The wand controller requirement is gone and they sell controllers in-store.

Do they even have a game controller API? I got a new controller and the game I wanted to play with it (Need for Speed: No Limits) doesn't support it o.o
Meow.
 
tipoo
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 8:24 pm

LostCat wrote:
tipoo wrote:
The wand controller requirement is gone and they sell controllers in-store.

Do they even have a game controller API? I got a new controller and the game I wanted to play with it (Need for Speed: No Limits) doesn't support it o.o


Yup, MFi

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LostCat
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Re: Apple TV 4K teardown: Active cooling, Thunderbolt on ARM

Tue Sep 26, 2017 8:29 pm

tipoo wrote:

Ahh. Still, that was really disappointing. I basically just threw $40 down the drain. Whoops.
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