electronupdate recently posted a tear down of the inexpensive Amazon Echo Dot internet of things/Alexa device.

This is just packed with technology, much of it state-of-the-art.  Let’s dive into the main board 1st.

Built around silicon from MediaTek, a Taiwan based fabless design house this is a great example of a system-on-chip (SOC).  The MT8516B (colored in red here) has four Arm A35 processor cores.  With each running up to 1.4 GHz the era of multi-GIP (giga instructions per second) at basically a free price is now here.  I doubt if this part costs much more than a few dollars.  In the year 2000 that level of processor power would put it at the very top of the very fastest supercomputer…. in 2020 so cheap that I did not even power this chip on for more than a few minutes before I did a destructive analysis.

Matched with the SOC is a DRAM and NAND.

Decapping the chips shows some interesting details, like the RF section of the MediaTek MT8516B:

See the video below and more in the post here.