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Not the first time an ARM chip has been in something named A4 either.



http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/A4.html

The manufacturing might be outsourced to Samsung, but the design is from Apple's in-house design team (they bought a chip design company last year), so, although it is based on an ARM core, it won't be identical to the one used in any Samsung devices - the question is, where have Apple done their changes, in the core microarchitecture or somewhere else on the dye.

Yeah, but it's been well known for quite some time that Apple are using ARM.

All the previous iPhone's had them, although different versions. The 3GS has the same ARM chip in it as the A4.

The A4 is the chip and was first used in the iPad, the iPhone 3GS has a regular ARM chip. The A4 is an in-house designed extension to the basic ARM core, much like the Scorpion processor in the Snapdragon platform used in some Android devices.

Like the Scorpion, the A4 takes the basic ARM used in devices like the 3GS and optimises it, including h.264 decoding and improvements in power consumption to give it a longer battery life. It will be interesting to see what the A4 actually brings the iPhone 4, in terms of performance and battery life, over the 3GS.

They're claiming the iPhone 4 has a 40% longer battery life than the 3GS. However they've also made the battery bigger, so it's quite hard to tell how much of that is down to using the A4 chip.