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Apple poaches Samsung chip designer Jim Mergard: Report

Apple poaches Samsung chip designer Jim Mergard: Report

By Kunal Dua | Updated: 12 October 2012 15:49 IST

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Apple has reportedly swooped in to sign chip designer Jim Mergard from Samsung. The move comes in the backdrop of the bitter Apple vs Samsung battle that has played out in courtrooms and markets all across the world.

Jim Mergard, a former AMD employee, joins Apple months after Jim Keller, a director in the platform architecture group and considered to be one of the key men behind Apple's A4 and A5 chips, left the company in August to make a return to AMD.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report Mergard's move:

The gadget maker (Apple) has hired Jim Mergard, a 16-year veteran of Advanced Micro Devices AMD 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.

The obvious thing for Mergard to do would be to join Apple's system-on-a-chip (SoC) design effort that has seen plenty of progress since the company first ventured in the territory with the Apple A4. More recently, the iPhone 5 is powered by Apple's A6 chip that is said to have twice as much CPU and GPU power compared to its predecessor.

WSJ also speculates if Mergard would design a custom-processor for use in Apple's Mac line. The report quotes Patrick Moorhead, a former AMD executive who now leads the research firm Moor Insights & Strategy, as saying that "He (Mergard) would be very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple."

While it's certainly possible for Apple to design a custom processor for use in its laptops and desktops, it's hard to see the company putting in a major effort towards that end considering Intel processors do a great job at the moment. More importantly, with a fundamental shift away from traditional computers already underway, and Apple at the forefront of that shift, any potential gains from having a custom chip in the Mac line, would be of minimum value at best.

As expected, Apple did not provide any official reaction to the WSJ report.

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Further reading: Apple, Chip Design, Jim Mergard, Samsung, SoC