LONDON — As far as I can tell, the teardowns of the Apple iPhone conducted over recent days by Semiconductor Insights and Portelligent have failed to come up with a definitive answer to the "ARM question" — at least so far.
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 break open a casing.
Scemama's assessment was three ARM processor cores. So that would be an ARM1176 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 own involvement on 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.
Or maybe there is a better way. Follow the code — as some iPhone and graphics processor afficianados have done (see July 6 story).
An examination of firmware, crash logs and cache dumps can reveal tell-tale references to processors and provide a better way to find out what is going on than simply deconstructing the circuit boards.
It would also be interesting to know if the 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 would make it Cambridge 5, Kings Langley 1, Rest of the World 0 on the iPhone processor score.
RSS
Digital
10 emerging technologies to watch:
EE Times has compiled a list of emerging technologies that we think will be worth watching out for in 2010. Biofeedback or thought-control of electronics are among the contenders.
10 CEOs out in 2009:
It's been a tough year for the global electronics industry and CEOs. We survey the dismissal of 10 industry CEOs during the first three quarters of 2009 and what's ahead for the rest of the year.
Executive pay:
The economy stinks. Rank-and-file engineers are feeling the pain. What about technology CEOs? We crunched the numbers buried in corporate financial statements to find out. Here's what we found.
10 companies in trouble (revisited):
What follows is an updated version of 10 companies in trouble. Some companies have been removed since the last version, others remain. Still others have been added to the mix.
Early predictions for 2010:
The electronics industry is recovering, but there is still some uncertainty in the market. Some see a boom year in 2010. Some see a double dip. So what's in store for the rest of this year and 2010?
Top 10 IC vendors with cash:
The world's biggest IC companies by revenue rank not only among the best in their respective industry segments but are also more likely to have huge piles of cash that can be used to fund acquisitions, R&D and product development.
Notable women in microelectronics:
There is no better time than a global economic recession to examine the keys to successful corporate governance. So, EE Times has compiled an international list that celebrates women who are business and technology leaders in semis.
EE Times updates Silicon 60:
Seventeen companies have been added to the lastest version of our Silicon 60 list of emerging startups. Forty-three companies survived as emerging companies that are still worth watching.
RSS| 
Digital| 
Mobile
