Did ARM just out Apple as a licensee 48 hours before the tablet launch?

Seth Weintraub

January 25, 2010

iPhone - iPod

Bob Morris, director of mobile computing at ARM, has been tight lipped about Apple's relationship with ARM for quite awhile (believe me, I tried to get him to confirm the relationship). Today, however, he told Sylvie Barack, in the context of Apple's tablet:

“all I can say is that there is one account we don’t ever talk about, and we don’t know what they’re doing on these types of products.”

Which is as close as I've seen to a confirmation that Apple and its PA Semi division are licensing the ARM designs for tablets and such. Until now they've been a secret licensee.

ARM is widely expected to outpace Intel in the red hot ultra-mobile space over the next three to five years due to its small, power efficient designs.

I believe we'll have confirmation of that ARM-Apple relationship in T-Minus 48 hours and counting...

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Comments (11)

DesignPro | January 25, 2010 - 11:55am

hope its The new multicore A9 !!!!!!

DesignPro | January 25, 2010 - 11:59am

It;s this monster mobile processor?

http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM11MPCoreMultiprocessor.html

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | January 25, 2010 - 12:01pm

the iphone has an ARM processor. nobody's been outed

admin | January 25, 2010 - 12:41pm

Samsung makes the iPhone's processor. Apple hasn't directly licensed that processor

lexequinerad (not verified) | January 25, 2010 - 12:11pm

Wow, this "suspense" is almost overwhelming. Now, Seth, maybe, this secret may be coming to light. The nondisclosure of the ARM corporation people, makes me think that the Apple's PA Semi people, may have an advanced design of the multi-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, for the iSlate, iPad...
The news has been that Marvel Corp. who bought the Intel XScale processor design, is purported to be developing a "quad-core" ARM Cortex A9. This may be far fetched, but I would venture, that PA Semi, will have an ARM Cortex A9 "Quad core," running at 1GHz+ ready for the Apple tablet. I may be wrong, but I am going to guess, that Steve Jobs, is visionary, and way ahead of the others, including, Nvidia's Tegra 2. Just "a hunch," and my thoughts, about all the secrecy.

5to9Mac Noob (not verified) | January 25, 2010 - 12:26pm

“all I can say is that there is one account we don’t ever talk about, and we don’t know what they’re doing on these types of products."

Evidently Bob has seen what happened to ATI when they spilled the beans about Apple products. Ten years ago, around MacWorld SF, someone at ATI released a press kit mentioning that three new Macs would be offered with brand new high-end ATI graphics cards. Fine, except that the press kit went out two days before Steve's keynote. When Steve himself was to make those announcements. Oops.

The result? Steve removed all mention of ATI from his keynote slides and speech, cancelled a Radeon keynote demo, ordered all Radeon cards to be removed from all Macs on display at MacWorld SF, and stopped talking directly to anyone at ATI. Apple then immediately began shipping systems with Nvidia graphics cards.

So, yeah, Bob, it's better that you don't mention Apple explicitly. Especially if Steve has asked you not to. Just ship that licensing fee to the bank and laugh. Quietly.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | January 25, 2010 - 12:58pm

maybe apple should have never sold its share of arm after co-founding it with acorn.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | January 25, 2010 - 5:23pm

If I didn't have a contract with Apple, I'd say something like this to make sure that people still think AMD relevant. A task that getting more and more difficult every day.

ernie. (not verified) | January 26, 2010 - 1:55am

I don't think ARM and AMD are the same thing.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | January 26, 2010 - 3:34am

Way back in the mid 90's, Apple used to own 43% of ARM

9to5Mac Noob | January 26, 2010 - 7:15pm

umm, i hate to play mr. obvious, but arm was a join venture between acorn, vlsi, and APPLE. thus, apple has effectively always been an arm licensee.