Does the TiVo have an unused 2nd processor inside it?
 

Whilst researching the TiVo, I came across some claims that the TiVo actually has two processors inside it, but that they can't get the second one to work.

Does anybody know if this is actually true?

Re: Does the TiVo have an unused 2nd processor inside it?
 

I'd be surprised if it was. Any electronics company continually revises their products to bring down manufacturing costs during the lifetime (this is why Microsoft and Sony can release "Slim" versions of their consoles a couple of years after release: They revise the design) of the product. I suspect Samsung and Cisco do the same with their Tivo units, and I'd be very surprised if they left a large and relatively expensive to manufacture chip in the design if it was unused.


The Tivo Premiere (which is the basis for the VM Tivo) is, however, built using a multi core processor, but according to http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...&client=safari (can't find the original), the Premiere does allow app developers to use multiple cores, so clearly their software can use multiple cores.

Re: Does the TiVo have an unused 2nd processor inside it?
 

It has a dual core inside. The 2nd core was enabled in a software release sometime between the end of 2010 and the March 2011. It was enabled before general release to customers.

Edit: Thinking about it, it may have been released later than March. There was another update around the same time that enabled the 3rd tuner. I can't honestly remember when either was released.

Edit 2: looking back I'm now fairly sure use of the 2nd core was enabled in release 15.2 which was out around October 2011.

Re: Does the TiVo have an unused 2nd processor inside it?
 

Thanks for the replies.

Another forum member has told me this:

It's a single core 400mhz MIPS chip by Broadcom ( BCM7019), there is another processor but thats reserved for cable modem operations and cannot be used by the Tivo OS. This applies to the Cisco , the samsung version will likely be the same. It does lack a GPU so all the menu rendering has to be done on the cpu.

My Tivo is mostly sluggish whenever its HDD is being accessed, mainly in the my shows section, everything else (on demand, catchup, tv guide, etc) is acceptable. Chances are they are using a really slow HDD, probably to reduce power consumption or heat or the OS has a fragmentation issue.

Re: Does the TiVo have an unused 2nd processor inside it?
 

Those specs sound more like the Series 3 specifications. The VM box is Dual core.

No GPU shouldn't be an issue and you wouldn't notice a slower hard drive being used.

Without knowing the details of the file system it's hard to comment on the possibility of Fragmentation occurring (and being a problem). All I know is that TiVO has at least 2 partitions, one for the MPEG data (i.e. the recorded streams) and one for the system (i.e. the databse of my shows, wishlists etc...). Fragmentation may occur on the latter partition but my anecdotal evidence that doesn't support this is my trial box, which was delivered to me empty also suffered from the same issues as my 2011 box.

In short either my trial box was refurbished and was delivered in a fragmented state or fragmentation isn't the sole contributor. Seeing as after the trial I had to have my original 2nd box replaced (due to the fact that VM couldn't sort out the fact my box had been offline for several months so needed reactivating) and it too is performing in a sub par manner I'd opt for fragmentation probably not being the route cause of poor performance.

For the record VM/Tivo are either happy with the performance or weren't able to make it quicker. During the recent trial we were asked to time the load times of certain things so they would have had exact figures for what the expected "live" performance would be.