The Blackberry Bold 9700 & Blackberry 9000 Review

What’s Inside A Bold 9700? Technical Specs

Written by SyncMaster on January 7, 2010 – 11:32 am -

A few weeks ago, I was looking for games to review and was kind of sad to see any descent graphics on the games for the Bold 9700. With a higher resolution screen like this one, games would look brilliant. Video does, after all. That led me to do a series of searches on Google for “Bold 9700 graphics chip..” etc. I of course did read about the whole curve got OpenGL and Bold’s didn’t.. yadda yadda. But that got me thinking… What capabilities DO these things have?

First off, the Bold 9000 and Bold 9700 contain the exact same processor. Let me give you a bit of background on the XScale microprocessor. Marvell currently own’s the design although Intel sold it to them in June of 2006 so it’s still safe to call it an Intel PXA930 as that’s what it really is. It’s the 5th generation of the ARM processor that is so famous in so many windows mobile devices running at 624Mhz – it’s a pretty snappy cpu.

PXA930 was code named Bulverde, and has several interesting features available such as Wireless Speedstep (system can downclock the cpu to save power), Wireless MMX - allowing multimedia, Also has SSE and can act as 16 extra 65bit registers that can be treated as an array of 32-bit words, or four 16-bit halfwords. Additional peripherals are also available such as USB host interface, and camera interface.

Intel announced a successor to the PXA930 in 2005 called the Monahan but it died quickly. At 1.25ghz there was only a 25% increase in horsepower overall. The blackberry bold 9000 and 9700 processor itself is actually based off a processor from 2004. Now nearing 5 years old it’s still surprising what a processor like this can do.

 

This is the test board for the PXA930. Just from looking at it, you can see the processor’s actually capable of handling a 640×480 LCD, compact flash port, PCMCIA (which you see on older laptops), serial port, audio in and out, usb host port, usb client, sim card, ps2, ethernet port (that’d be nice!), IDE interface, SD port, GPS, touch panel etc…. This is no weak unit.

When the Bold 9700 “Aka Onyx” was announced, it was supposed to be a completely different phone – but I think with the re-use of the PXA930 and some obvious other internals, including the battery, it just made more sense to call it the Bold 2. Yes, sure smaller, faster (OS improvements not hardware improvements), more ram (256MB vs 128MB) and higher resolution screen and camera. But the core structure of the phone itself hasn’t changed. Phonewreck has a complete diagram showing the complete block diagram of how this chip is used and what services are attached to it.

Tags: bold 9000, bold 9700, details, diagram, graphics, internal, memory, motherboard, parts, processor, schematic, specs, tear apart, tear down
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