“Warren East, president and chief executive officer of ARM Holdings plc, has confirmed that “at least three” processor cores developed at his company are present within the iPhone from Apple Inc.,” Peter Clarke reports for EE Times.
Clarke reports, “The main CPU for the iPhone is a PXA320, formerly the Monahan applications processor from Intel Corp., now supplied by Marvell Technology Group Ltd. The PXA320 is therefore a descendant of the StrongARM processor developed by Digital Equipment Corp. under an architectural license from ARM in the 1990s.”
Clarke reports, “When asked how many ARM processor cores were in the iPhone, East said his company has a good track record of not talking about customers’ products… When asked to say if three was an underestimate or even a large underestimate, East said: ‘Apple will talk about the contents of the iPhone when Apple’s ready to talk about the contents of the iPhone.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: The ARM design was started in 1983 as a development project at Acorn Computers Ltd. In the late 1980s Apple Computer started working with Acorn on newer versions of the ARM core. This work would eventually turn into the ARM6. The first models were released in 1991, and Apple used the ARM6-based ARM 610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA.
