Apple Pinches Top Samsung Chip Designer

Apple has poached a top chip designer from Samsung, its nemesis as well as its foundry. It’s waltzed off with the guy who was chief engineer at AMD until June of 2011, when he went to work for Samsung down Texas way as chief system architect. Jim Mergard, who was at AMD for 16 years, is regarded as an expert in PC chips, APUs and SoCs. It’s not clear why exactly Apple hired him – aside from spite – or what his job’s going to be at Apple. But the Wall Street Journal quotes one of Mergard’s former colleagues from AMD, Patrick Moorhead, now in the research business at Moor Insights & Strategy, as saying, that besides Mergard’s SoC skills, “He would be very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple.”

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