An Italian newspaper article quotes Dario Bucci of Intel Italia as saying that the iPhone uses Marvell‘s Xscale-derived CPUs. (Curiously enough, the current version of this article doesn’t show this part of the interview anymore…)

Well, who cares? Indeed, by now I agree with HiveLogic that the CPU is irrelevant. Marvell bought Xscale from Intel about 6 months ago. Xscale, in turn, uses some of the ubiquitous ARM cores that were rumored to be the iPhone’s CPU (as well as, probably, powering some other chips in there). But as the HiveLogic article says:

And now the iPhone uses yet another CPU, and we should still expect OS X to feel like OS X. Apple seems to be pushing the idea that the CPU shouldn’t matter to the user of an Apple product. And I think that?s why Apple isn’t talking about the iPhone?s CPU.

Right. With Leopard, Apple’s development tools support building apps for any combination of 32-bit, 64-bit, PowerPC (big-endian) or Intel (little-endian) CPUs. Since the gcc compiler supports ARMs and many other architectures, and the major stumbling block (the endian issue) has been solved, by now OS X can be safely assumed to run on nearly any modern CPU.

Now, in the past, I’ve been as prone as any to argue endlessly about the superiority of the PowerPC architecture (or of the 68K architecture for that matter) over x86, but for most practical purposes I have to admit all that has become a non-issue – especially for a device like the iPhone. I for one welcome our new <your architecture here> overlords, and that’s that.