Apple headhunt ex-AMD design guru from Samsung

One of Samsung's leading design expert's Jim Mergard has been headhunted from Samsung into the Apple fold. A report published on the Wall Street Journal indicates that Apple have managed to snag Mergard – a designer who has also worked developing chips at AMD for 16 years.

Mergard was vice president and chief engineer before leaving for Samsung and one of the top names in the industry. He was involved in the development of the AMD Brazos processor, used in many low end laptop systems.

Mergard has been hailed as ‘an expert in both PC technology and ‘systems on a chip” according to ex AMD chief Patrick Moorhead. The system on a chip design has been used in many Apple products also.

Moorhead also said that Mergard would be ‘very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple'.

Apple have wanted to design their own silicon now for some time and released their A4 processor which is an ARM Cortex A8 CPU used in the original iPad.

The iPhone 5 uses the latest A6 SoC with a custom designed core, a step away from the standard ARM architecture used by other manufacturers.

Kitguru says: This is a major long-term win for Apple, no doubt about it.

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