Published in AI

Amazon, TI tight lipped about CPU in Kindle Fire

by on04 October 2011


We can confirm it’s not Tegra 2
We sent an email to Amazon’s Kindle press team and we didn’t get any reply regarding the processor used in what’s arguably the hottest Android tablet to hit the market to date.

We then emailed Texas Instruments and asked if the CPU inside Kindle Fire comes from Texas Instruments and we got a reply. Unfortunately it was not the reply that we were hoping for as TI explicitly said that the OEM (Amazon) has to announce what kind of CPU they are using and that TI doesn’t have the power to comment on this matter. So far, officially Amazon only writes that “Kindle Fire features a state-of-the-art dual-core processor for fast, powerful performance”.

It will remain unknown if OMAP 4 is inside of that device but we can confirm that the chip inside Kindle Fire is not Tegra based. We got this confirmed from industry sources close to Nvidia. Separate sources have said that the chip inside is OMAP 4 grade, but we didn’t get any specifics about it.

We understand that Amazon wants to get people excited about the services and capabilities of Kindle Fire, but we know quite a lot of people that will wait until someone gets a Kindle Fire, crack it open and tell the world what sort of CPU is actually inside. This is probably the most important fact that remains to be revealed, in order to make a lot of power users make its final buying decision.

This drives us back to the times when ATI got a deal with Motorola Razr, very popular phone that came out in Q3 2004. Due to Motorola nature ATI couldn’t talk about its presence in this phone at all. This was one lost opportunity and we were hoping that at least someone from TI will be able to comment and confirm the CPU inside Kindle Fire. TI did confirm that they are the CPU inside Blackberry Playbook but they won’t do it this time, at least not yet.

We should give Nvidia credit for making it clear once they get inside of the phone or tablet, they don’t let their partners to be quiet about the chip inside, even Samsung publicly says that it has Tegra 2 chips in its most of its tablets.
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