Some time ago I wrote:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

I think Apple will take OS-hardware integration to a new peak with the Intel Macs. They’ll have a gigabyte or so of flash memory where an encrypted version of the Mac OS X will reside – a return to the days of the first Mac 128, when most of the toolbox was in ROM and the “System” file just contained patches and late-minute additions.

Looks like I was wrong on that. The nuts nice people at Kodawari-san have just posted pictures of the innards of the new iMac Core Duo; there’s no huge amount of flash memory visible. Of course these may or may not be pictures of an actual production system, but chances are that they’re authentic.

I wish they’d done more and sharper pictures, but here’s what we can see:

Front and back views of the CPU board (or is it the other way around? no matter). It can’t be properly called a motherboard since there are no expansion slots. The RAM socket is in the same place as in the last iMac G5.

A shot of the Intel Core Duo processor. The T2400 designator says it’s a 1.83GHz clock version. There’s a liquid cooling block which displaces the heat to a position where the fans can blow it away.

This is the ATI graphics chip. No surprise there.

An Intel 82945GM controller, also known as the 945GM Express chipset. This chip interfaces the Core Duo processor to DDR2 SDRAM and to the I/O controller; the frontside bus to the processor runs at 667MHz and is 32 bits wide. The memory bus is 64 bits wide and also runs at up to 667MHz. Of note here is that it’s limited to 4GB of RAM. It supports internal graphics, LCDs, TV output and some other stuff not used in the iMac. It also has a PCI-Express bus to which (judging from the board layout) the ATI chip is connected.

Now look at this picture. It shows an Intel 82801GBM I/O Controller Hub chip. This chip does most everything else; it also has a PCI-Express interface, LAN controller, 8 USB ports, SATA, IDE, audio, you-name-it. No direct FireWire support; obviously Apple has connected a separate controller chip to it. Most interestingly, the somewhat blurry 28-pin chip to the right in this photo seems to be the Infineon TPM chip.

I’ve downloaded Intel’s manuals for these chips; it’s a huge mass of information (and, strangely, Preview won’t open most of them, although Acrobat Reader works). More details after I’ve read all that stuff…

The last-gen iMac G5’s hardware manual doesn’t seem to be available, but the one for the May’2005 version is (it’s the one I’m typing this on). The block diagram is somewhat similar; the “U3 Lite” corresponds to the 82945GM chip, the “Shasta” corresponds to the 82801GBM.