While the info is confusing and a bit hard to find, it is freely available out there on the internet. Not to mention that the article seems to imply that HHTech, a Chinese company, commissioned Austria Microsystems to build the chip, or at least had a hand in its development, and that article is dated March of 2007. From what I can tell, AMS marketed this chip at the component level to all manufacturers, and Sandisk simply chose it due to the fact that it has more than enough power and features for what they wanted in their next generation of PMP’s. So any discussion of the hardware features of the chip itself should be free game for anyone. I do understand that specific hardware and firmware kernel discussion would NOT be information employees could share, due to them not wanting their FW to be hackable or even replaceable, thanks to the DRM licensing fees they had to pay, among other things. Yet hopefully they are willing to discuss what type of features the hardware itself is capable of, due to internal components, pinouts, etc, and would only need to be enabled through firmware. They may not wanna get our hopes up about a possible feature that’s far off or they don’t wanna give us, so I guess we’ll just have to wait for one of them to chime in and see.
In the mean time, thanks for that link, if anyone else has any other relevant info or links pertaining to this SOC, throw it up! I’m always very interested to know exactly how my gadgets work and what’s in them, and now I’m on a real kick about this versatile little SOC!
And BTW, thanks for the info about the line-out, good to know that it actually is there. So you’re saying that its active on pins 27 and 28, all you need to do is make a cable? Or does it only work when its docked, which means its also sending it straight to the dock’s amp, so we can’t really get line out anyway? Even if it is the second one, seems that you could simply activate those pins that signal its docked, and run the line out from there. Alternatively, you could probably cut open the $15 Griffin dock, and separate the line-out before it goes to the amp, though this is nowhere near as convenient as a simple cable… But definitely keep us updated on your progress!
