This is Cool Stuff that someone else Found: Cabel Sasser over at Panic has been testing video out from iOS devices, and stumbled onto something very interesting: Getting from a Lightning-connector-based iOS device to HDMI via Apple's $49 Lightning Digital AV Adapter involves some heavy-duty video decoding and re-encoding. Digging deeper, Cabel found a processor and 2Gb of RAM (which is to say, 256MB, thanks, Michael in the comments!) baked inside the adapter. Turns out that the adapter runs its own mini operating system in there to do all this work. This is because the Lightning connector is just a serial bus incapable of streaming "raw" HDMI across it. And we know all of this because someone from Apple (presumably an engineer) posting as "Anonymous Coward" went into great detail explaining it in the post's comments. Very cool indeed, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this all develops.
Check It Out: Apple's Lightning Digital AV Adapter Contains a CPU and RAM
