Friday, February 25, 2011

New MacBooks Torn Open, Thunderbolt Chip Revealed

New MacBooks Torn Open, Thunderbolt Chip Revealed: "

Inside the new 15 inch MacBook Pro, complete with Thunderbolt controller


The little pinky nail sized chip you see up there, inside the green square, is almost certainly the controller chip for the new MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt port. The chip, and its tasty thermal paste topping, were found inside the new MacBooks by the teardown experts at iFixit.


The Thunderbolt (nee Light Peak) controller IC is what enables it to work its multi-protocol, daisy-chaining magic. Without that chip to process the serial data gushing through the copper, Thunderbolt would be little more than a dumb wire.


Other than Thunderbolt and upgrades to the CPU and graphics hardware, the new MacBooks are almost unchanged from the previous incarnation. The battery is the same 77.5 watt-hour model as before, and the case is virtually identical. Changes have been made to the wireless card now has four antennas instead of three, and the RAM is now the same as that used in last year’s 21.5 and 27 inch iMacs. There is also lots of thermal paste smeared around in there, which suggests that things are running hotter than before.


As ever, head to iFixit to see the guts if the new MBP in explicit, closeup detail, and marvel at just how few parts go into this thing.


MacBook Pro 15″ Unibody Early 2011 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]


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