Edible Apple

About a year ago, we reported on a second-hand story involving Steve Jobs wherein the late Apple CEO once touted that Apple had over 1,000 engineers working on chip technology. “Getting low power and smaller is the key to everything,” Jobs reportedly said.

And now Apple has an all-star addition to their chip team.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has recently hired Jim Mergard, a former chip designer and executive at AMD before he recently took a new position working at Samsung.

The gadget maker has hired Jim Mergard, a 16-year veteran of Advanced Micro Devices who was a vice president and chief engineer there before he left for Samsung. He is known for playing a leading role in the development of a high-profile AMD chip that carried the code name Brazos and was designed for low-end portable computers.

Veteran technical talent is in high demand and there are many opportunities for top-flight engineers to move between companies. But any movement between Samsung and Apple comes at an interesting time.

According to former AMD executive Moorhead, who the WSJ quotes briefly, Mergard brings years of experience and expertise in PC chip design along with system-on-a-chip design. Consequently, Mergard could potentially help Apple out not only with its mobile efforts, but also with the company’s line of Macs which run on Intel processors. “He would be very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple,” Moorhead explained.

And so a former AMD executive steps into Apple just a few months after one recently left. Back in early August AMD announced that Jim Killer would be returning to work for the company after having spent the previous few years working at PA Semi and later at Apple.

via WSJ