Opening the Fire TV’s case isn’t much of an issue — it’s just held together with a few plastic clips. There is only one large board inside the Fire TV with 8GB of Toshiba flash storage, 2GB of Samsung RAM, a Qualcomm dual-band 2×2 802.11n+Bluetooth chip, and a few power and controller chips. Beneath the RAM is the Qualcomm ARM system-on-a-chip (SoC). Interestingly, Amazon lists this as a model APQ8064, which would be the Snapdragon S4 Pro. However, Qualcomm has corrected Amazon to confirm that this chip is actually an APQ8064T — the Snapdragon 600. That makes sense considering the 1.7GHz Krait 300 CPU cores.
So this is a powerful little box — the Snapdragon 600 is the chip powering devices like the 2013 HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4. To ensure the Fire TV doesn’t actually become a fire, Amazon has integrated a huge heatsink that takes up most of the bottom of the device. There’s also a thermal pad atop the RAM/SoC to help disperse that heat. The heatsink is a little tough to pry up, but it’s technically removable.
The folks at iFixit also took a look inside the remote, which has a simple low-power Bluetooth controller and a microphone for voice commands. The game controller (sold separately) is a bit more unusual. For some reason Amazon opted for non-standard tri-wing screws, which makes it hard to open up. The single board inside this device is pretty standard for game controllers — Bluetooth, NXP controller, and analog multiplexers.
So the Fire TV is essentially running phone hardware with a few more ports on the backside. It should have enough power to play most modern games without issue and decode video like a champ. The device is available right now for $99 with Prime shipping on Amazon.
More...
