Audio

The Sony Touchscreen Walkman X-Series Dissected

Posted on

May 20, 2009

When the Walkman X-Series (NW-X1050, NW-X1060) debuted on the FCC on Feburary 5th, Sony filed a short term confidentiality letter to block the public from seeing the internal photos for a month and a half. I went back and looked at the PDF and the pictures are now available. I wasn’t able to find much information on the components, except the 250mhz ARM processor that is the brains of the music player, which is a far cry from the 533mhz processor in the iPod Touch. It’s called the MP201, made by NEC and debuted back in July 2006 – and probably has some tweaks for this generation especially since there is an OLED screen involved. It’s not immediately clear how much memory is in the device, as it can vary from 64 – 512mb but we could imagine that with all the functions within it is most certainly 256mb or more. Here’s a general block diagram of the processor:

The MP201 chip represented a significant advance for digital audio players, video recorder/players, and other portable devices that enables consumers to download the latest audio content or receive mobile terrestrial digital broadcasts. Here are some of the specs:

CPU: ARM926EJ-STM (MAX. 250MHz, I-cache: 16KB, D-cache: 16KB)
DSP: SPXK611 (250MHz MAX., I-cache: 32KB, D-cache: 32KB)
H.264 decoder: QVGA 30fps
MPEG4 encoder/decoder: QVGA 30fps
Internal RAM: 256KB SRAM
SDRAM interface: SDR-SDRAM (125MHz MAX., 64Mb to 512Mb × 2, 32bits)
Asynchronous memory interface: x16bit, 62.5MHz (at FLASH burst mode)
NAND FLASH interface: Multiple values NAND error correcting circuit enabled

If anyone out there knows what kind of wireless chips are in here maybe we can find out if this thing has bluetooth or not.

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