Wow, TVs are complicated

Check out this teardown of a Sony OLED TV. It looks like Sony has a standardized architecture for their TVs, which makes sense, but which also means that some TVs have unused capabilities (such as a multi-core CPU powerful enough to run a web browser. I wish an enterprising hacker would figure out how to download code and run them on the TVs -- my understanding from reading Sony's GPL web site is that they already have Linux and busybox installed. Oh well, maybe GPL 3.0 will force Sony to make their TVs user-upgradable in the future.

It's significant that Sony's not using the Cell CPU in their TVs. That was part of the justification for spending so much on Cell. I assume this means that Cell's just not cost-effective for TVs.

Comments

Anonymous said…
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Unknown said…
Hi Jack,

It's me, Sakphong. Are you having fun? Are you by any chance working on Andriod?

I no longer work for MSFT, email me sakphong_at_google_dot_com whenever you wanna chat.

Have fun!!!

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