During Steve Jobs's Macworld keynote on January 9, I asked: Now what's inside an iPhone?: "Has Apple ported OS X to the ARM chip?"
It's a significant issue because getting software running on an iPhone is a different matter if it has to be recompiled for a processor that's incompatible with both the Intel and PowerPC versions of OS X.
Now, Information Week reports :
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.
"ARM is in 90 percent of the world's [mobile phone] handsets; we're in Wi-Fi, baseband processors and applications processors and most of the world's MP3 players. So it's at least three," East said.
Given the history of Apple and the ARM chip (see Oh the irony -- the iPhone, ARM, Marvell and Freescale, below), this is not a surprise. Indeed, Dario Bucci, an Intel executive in Italy, pointed to an ARM from Marvell in an interview dated January 18.
Bear in mind that ARM doesn't supply chips, it just licenses intellectual property to third parties: it's not a direct source. But still, you really wouldn't expect it to divulge details of a customer's products before they've even shipped. Especially when the customer is known to be as tyrannical about secrecy as Steve Jobs.
