ARM Announces Major New Licensee, Is it Apple?

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If it turns out not to be Apple, the only other OEM that springs to mind in this sector is Samsung, as they have the knowledge and experience of designing and fabrication, much like Apple.

Samsung doesn't already have a license? or is it limited to manufacturing and not chip development? If that is the case, then who actually *designed* the ARM11 app processor in the iPhone?

QUOTE=CWallace;5942068]How about Google and their Android platform?[/QUOTE]
Google has the money, but no hardware engineering experience that I know of, and more importantly I fail to see any reason why they would want to meddle with that. Even if they are indeed working on their own Android-based "Gphone" device, it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend so much money and effort to design a custom ARM chip, when the current off-the-shelf implementations from TI, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others work great. They have always said they are not solely targeting the high-end of phone users with Android, but rather the whole market including low-cost, high-volume phones.

ARMs current cores for licensees include the 4 core Cortex A9 design. It uses 250mw and gives an incredible performance...
*snip* ...The PowerVR graphics core from Imagination has a similar power efficiency lead over its rivals.

Yea, the Cortex-A9 certainly looks like a beast! Out of order, up to four cores, and up to 1.0ghz! Even a single-core Cortex-A8 (in-order) at 600-800mhz would be great! With these new cores, I find it very hard to believe that Intel is going to be able to compete in the embedded space. Perhaps if they always stay ahead in manufacturing and have a 22nm Atom vs a 45nm ARM or something, but It's hard to believe. They don't even have the Atom as a system-on-a-chip yet! Since it's x86, the only benchmarks I ever see of Atom compare it to Pentium M and Core 2/Core 2 ULV. Where are the Atom vs ARM Cortext-A9 bechmarks???

Oh and speaking of PowerVR embedded graphics , The iPhone with it's 'MBX lite' is ALREADY old hat. When the iPhone 3G came out it (the graphics not the phone) was already obsolete! The new 'SGX' core chips can scale up to 100+ milion polygon/sec! Why aren't other competitors getting this new graphics chip? Its funny how everyone casts the iPhone as having spectacular graphics capabilites, when in fact the state-of-the-art technology wise is MUCH better, but apparently no one is using it yet in mobile devices.

But I tell you what, Whenever Sony or Nintentendo or Microsoft makes a new handheld game console, BOY IS IT GOING TO FLY! Imagine a 1.0Ghz Cortex A9 and
"PowerVR SGX540". It could run many relatively recent (2-3 years back) DirectX9 desktop games!

 

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Samsung doesn't already have a license? or is it limited to manufacturing and not chip development? If that is the case, then who actually *designed* the ARM11 app processor in the iPhone?

Samsung (like most other ARM OEMs) received a license to use the ARM core. They were most likely given a VHDL (or equivalent) representation of the processor core which can be treated as a "black box" that they can embedded as component within their in-house design. This may be one of several standard variants of ARM7, ARM9, ARM11, or one of the Cortex cores.

They then take the standard interfaces exposed by the ARM core's black box (the instruction and data busses) and connect them to their own designs for memory, peripherals, etc.

Every OEM using the same core inherits all the same characteristics for things like instruction sets, timing etc. They differentiate themselves according to the functionality that is connected externally. For example, they may make a niche for themselves by using a more efficient data bus to minimize the impact of cache misses and keep a steady instruction throughput. Or they may offer a more diverse set of peripherals to minimize unnecessary external components. Or they may have a particularly powerful DMA subsystem to allow those peripherals exchange data amongst themselves with minimal hand-holding by the CPU core itself.

The StrongARM has been used as an example of being a product of an "architectural license" similar to the new partner that was just announced. If that is, indeed the case, then what we'd be likely to see would be a custom implementation of components within the ARM core itself. The result would be a whole new variant of the ARM architecture, allowing enhancements to features that would have otherwise been impossible if constrained to one of ARM's own "black box" implementations. This may include a different implementation for the data or instruction fetching and decoding pipeline. It may be a more efficient cache architecture. It may involve some additions or enhancements to the instruction set itself.