Does Apple's iPhone have an ARM chip? Want ad hints yes

Everyone wants to know what's in the Apple iPhone. One of the company's want ads provides a hint that it could be an ARM chip.

An ad on the company's Web site for a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi engineer says that an "additional success factor" is experience with ARM. In all, Apple has 33 want ads up for iPhone engineers.

ARM makes complete sense and was actually the pick of many people here at CNET News.com (including me). ARM chips are found inside over 90 percent of the world's cell phones, and generally the chips provide better battery performance than x86 chips. Intel's ultra low power x86 chips aren't out yet. (ARM, companies it has acquired and Apple also have a long history together that predates the release of the Newton.) ARM doesn't make chips. Instead, it licenses chip designs to Samsung, Texas Instruments and Intel, among others.

If the phone does have an ARM chip in it, it does raise interesting compatibility nuances. Apple's computers run on Intel x86 chips. ARM chips run lots of OS's, but they don??t make a native x86. Apple has of course made operating systems for both, but it now leads with the x86 platform. Not using an x86 chip complicates software support for plug-in technologies such as Java or Flash.