Apple with P.A. is possible ARM architecture licensee

LONDON — Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England), has declined to name the company that has taken a multiyear architecture license for ARM's current and future technologies. But East gave enough clues while speaking to financial analysts on Wednesday (July 30) to show clearly that Apple is a contender.

I'll throw down some circumstantial evidence but for me processor design guru Dan Dobberpuhl is the key.

Whoever the licensee should prove to be, the company signed the far-reaching license during the second quarter, and is a leading OEM handset maker that wants to develop its roadmap for mobile computing devices. It is also seems to be handset maker that wants to keep control of its handset design, including the components within it. Sound like anyone familiar?

The Apple iPhone is thought to have as many as five ARM processor cores inside it, but those processor cores are contained in multiple chips from several different chip vendors. Wouldn’t that be perfect for rationalizing into a multicore ARM architecture, if Apple chose to go down that route?

The last time an ARM executive boasted to me about signing a license deal for technology that the company had not even invented yet, was back in the late 1990s. The executive concerned had just returned from negotiating the terms of an architectural license with Intel Corp. which had to be recast after Intel inherited the StrongARM processor along with part of computer maker Digital Equipment Corp.

And who was the engineer that had led the Digital Equipment team that developed StrongARM under an architectural license. It was Dan Dobberpuhl, subsequently chief executive officer of Palo Alto Semiconductor Inc. With the recent acquisition of P.A. Semi by Apple Dobberpuhl has become an Apple employee. And perhaps now, with ARM's disclosure, we are beginning to see why Apple was interested in Dobberpuhl and his capable design team.