Asus Transformer Prime Teardown

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer prime is a relatively new tablet on the market, mostly known for its ability to “transform” from tablet to netbook with a keyboard dock.  It features 18hours of battery life, which is 8 more hours of fun than you get with an ipad. Also it has a quad core tegra, which certainly makes it the fastest tablet on the market. But Asus has received a lot of critic over the past few weeks mainly due to GPS issues and the fact that the bootloader is locked (aka no custom roms). Apparently the GPS issues are due to the fact that the antenna tries to receive signals through a metal plating, which is impossible. And even though the ipad for example is also covered in metal it has plastic openings for signals to pass through. There has been an update to fix this problem but since its a design flaw it can only be tweaked — not fixed by updates.

Our friends at Chipworks have made an elaborate teardown, so check that out below. Click on an image to enlarge it and there will be a description on every image!

Meanwhile they are still doing some lab work to produce die photos including a backside poly of the Tegra 3 so you can see the full die layout, so keep your eyes open for more!

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime 645×409 150×150

 Update

Chipworks has released their article, which takes a closer look at the chips and technical details.

This is what the Tegra chip looks like inside

Heres a closer look at the Nvidia Tegra 3 chip

They xrayed it and sent it for delayering, but they noticed something new. The device actually has 5 cores, with 4 dedicated to normal operation and one for a low power mode. There are other processors on the market that do this, but its fairly rare. Also i cant help but think there will come a hack to unleash all cores, like it did with the “3” core AMD pehnom.

Dont forget that both we and chipworks will release a closer look at the Tegra 3 later on!