“Samsung recently raised eyebrows by beefing up its team of Texas-based chip designers, including those whose backgrounds pointed to an interest in chips for server systems. Now one of the most prominent of those recruits has left the South Korean company for Apple,” Don Clark reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“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,” Clark reports. “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.”
Clark reports, “Patrick Moorhead, a former AMD executive who now leads the research firm Moor Insights & Strategy, said Mergard brings deep expertise in both PC technology as well as in products known as SoCs – systems on a chip – that combine various kinds of special-function circuitry on a single piece of silicon. Besides the current breed of Apple smartphones and tablets, Moorhead says Mergard’s talents could potentially be applied to Apple’s PC efforts, where its Macs use Intel chips but not SoCs. ‘He would be very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple,’ Moorhead says.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Heh! Slavish copier Samsung couldn’t even compete with Apple before. Now they’ll just fall even further behind. Samsung: Slower, less efficient processors stuck into chintzy plastic cases with noticeably inferior build-quality.
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