It's not exactly the sort of thing that need be a huge secret, but according to the New York Times an Apple engineer let slip on his Linkedin page that he's heading up a team at Apple working on a new ARM architecture for the iPhone. Apple is generally pretty secretive about such things, and it seems the engineer, Wei Han Lien, has quickly adjusted his profile to cover his tracks.

It doesn't come as a huge surprise, considering Apple recently blew $300 million acquiring a chip design company, PA Semiconductors, or the intrinsically open source nature of ARM architecture itself. ARM licenses out its core system to lots of chip designers, who then customise it to meet their own requirements - a system particularly popular in the mobile industry.

Currently the iPhone uses a system customised by Samsung, but it makes perfect sense - what with the popularity and continued development of the iPhone - for Apple to work on its own model.

In all likelihood, Apple will be looking into ARM designs in an attempt to reduce the number of chips required in the iPhone - adapting the licensed processor to handle the handset's unique features more competently and with less weight of expensive silicon inside.