ARM CEO: iPhone to sport "at least three" ARM CPUs

Just last week, a post made to the LLVM-dev mailing list by an Apple employee shed some light on the brains behind the iPhone. Based on the evidence at hand, it looked like the chip was likely to be an ARM processor and would probably be provided by either Marvell or Samsung. Turns out we weren't too far off track: Warren East, president and CEO of ARM Holdings has confirmed that "at least three" ARM processor cores will be present in the iPhone. Yowza! That still leaves one question unanswered, however: who is manufacturing the chip(s)? Information Week claims to have the low-down, stating that "the main CPU for the iPhone is a PXA320, formerly the Monahan applications processor from Intel, now supplied by Marvell Technology Group." If the StrongARM-derived PXA320 is indeed the culprit, then it's quite likely that the other ARM parts in the iPhone will handle separate tasks such as music playback, WiFi and cellular network linkup.

For more on the iPhone processor(s):
- see this report from Information Week