Sharp reveals the brain of i iPod video

Apple is expected to release a new iPod-player with video support soon and now it seems that at Ars Technica they’ve been able to find some information regarding the brains of Apple’s video iPod. It namely seems like Sharp is running around and bragging about its Sharp LH7A400 SOC (System on a chip) circuit that according to them will be used by Apple and with the video iPod. Sharp’s circuit will apparently have enough power to handle the video features in the new iPod.

“The chip runs at 1.8V core voltage, sits in a 256-pin PBGA package, and has more than enough muscle to do video playback. In fact, I hear that a roughly iPod-sized engineering sample based on the chip is being shown decoding MPEG4, MP3, and JPEG to a 4:3 aspect ratio color TFT.”

Specifications for Sharp LH7A400 SOC are as follows according to Ars Technica:

• ARM922T 32-bit RISC CPU @ 200MHz, 8K instruction cache/8K data cache, MMU


• 32-bit external data bus


• Internal SRAM


• SDRAM controller


• Color/Grayscale LCD controller


• USB 2.0 Full Speed Device


• Multiple UARTs


• IrDA


• Synchronous serial port


• I²C or SMBus


• GPIO


• Audio CODEC and AC97 Interface


• MMC, Smart Card, and PCMCIA/CF support

If Sharp is telling the truth it is looking like an iPod video really is about to arrive soon and the power seems to be more than enough.

Source: Ars Technica