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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
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Apple Ad Hints That iPhone Will Have Arm Chip Inside
What processor will the iPhone use? That’s one of the great unanswered questions left in the wake of Apple’s ...
January 12, 2007 — CIO —
What processor will the iPhone use? That’s one of the great unanswered questions left in the wake of Apple’s launch of the iPhone this week, but a job ad on Apple’s website may hint at the answer.
The open position is a networking engineer to work on the iPhone, and as the ad makes clear, Apple is looking for someone who knows the Mac OS and embedded platforms, and Arm processors in particular.
 |
| The Apple iPhone |
An Arm chip would be the logical component for a device like the iPhone. Arm is already the dominant provider of smart-phone application processors, because its chips are powerful enough to meet the computing needs of these products while at the same time requiring little power—a critical component to keeping the phones running between charges.
If the iPhone’s brain is Arm-based, it will represent a new direction for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, which will power the device.
To date, Mac OS has been ported to Intel’s x86 processors and IBM’s PowerPC, but Arm would represent a third platform for Apple’s operating system.
On the other hand, it is possible that Intel or IBM could develop new processors that would meet the iPhone’s requirements, saving Apple from doing the porting work to make Mac OS run on the new platform, said Peter Glaskowsky, technical analyst with the Envisioneering Group.
"To me the number-one unresolved question about the iPhone is: Does it use an Arm with a port, or does it use some new PowerPC or x86 chip?" he said.
Glaskowsky said that even if Apple is looking for Arm skills, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Arm will be powering the iPhone’s operating system. "I wouldn’t read too much into that," he said of the ad. "If you think about most modern smart phones ... it’s very common for them to have four processors in the device."
Apple could be using an Arm chip to do something like voice compression or to simply process wireless networking signals. (Apple’s ad is for a "Bluetooth/WiFi" software engineer.)
"It may have nothing to do with what’s running Mac OS on there," Glaskowsky said.
-Robert McMillan, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
Related Links:
- Why Apple i-Anything Is a Non-Issue for CIOs and Corporate America
- Cisco Hits Apple With Lawsuit over iPhone Name
- Apple, Cingular Partner on iPhone
Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.
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