What is "under the hood" on my Sony Blu Ray player?

I have a first gen Sony Blu Ray player and was curious about the kind of hardware it takes to play 1080P high definition video (MSRP at the time my friend bought it (and then gave it to me) was $399.). My laptop also has a BD drive, and plays them at a downconverted 1440 x 900 on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 duo with no problems whatsoever, and considering that that only takes up maybe not even a full core's processing speed during playback, I'm guessing that the processor on the device can't be more than a single-core of no greater than 2.0 GHz (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen BD takes nearly 3 minutes to load to the menu UI, and even a standard DVD takes up to two before I'm at the menu), but I'd really like to know if anyone knows what exactly the hardware is that plays my BD's. What exactly's going on "under the hood"? Also, I realize that everything on one of these in integrated, and that an integrated chipset can't really be equated to a tower of any kind, but do these things actually have a GPU of any kind, or are all operations on a Blu Ray player entirely CPU driven? I could probably think up a crapload more questions to ask, but I guess I'd be satisfied in just knowing how my BluRay player works and what's doing it. And even more satisfied knowing the specifications of my utterly snail-speed BluRay system.