Peter Clarke

(07/06/2007 9:01 AM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.j...

The ARM question is: "How many ARM processor cores does it take to make an iPhone?" and we are inclined to tip our hat to Didier Scemama, semiconductor analyst with ABN AMRO Bank here, who seemed to get most of the iPhone teardown information right, back in January without having to take break open a casing.

Scemama's assessment was three ARM processor cores. So that would be an ARM10 or 11 in the Samsung 5L8900, an ARM9 or 7 in the Marvell W8686 wireless LAN chip and a ARM926 in the Infineon PMB8876 S-Gold2 chip. But could there be more?

Of course the reason the teardowns don't answer the 'ARM question' is because it is difficult. Chip vendors and manufacturers don't always advertise their involvement on their own chip packaging. And IP vendors rarely get an explicit name check so it would be necessary to expose the die and then perform pattern recognition to spot the processor core and identify it by correlation with known examples.

Even then their may not be known 1:1 examples if a processor is the first example in a process technology node.

But it would also be interesting to know if processor used in the Broadcom BCM5973A touch screen controller in the iPhone was developed in Cambridge, England.

That, along with the XAP 16-bit RISC likely to be inside the CSR 41B14 BlueCore4ROM Bluetooth chip and the PowerVR MBX from Imagination Technologies Group plc rumored to be inside the main Samsung chip woult make it Cambridge 5, Kings Langley 1, Rest of the World 0 on the iPhone processor score.