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Another AMD engineer goes to Apple

Apple has an affinity for AMD chip engineers. The latest hire has lots of experience with graphics chips, an area that Apple is focusing on now with its A series processors.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers

The latest AMD chip engineer to pop up at Apple is a graphics and system-on-a-chip expert.

John Bruno is now a system architect at Apple, as of July.

Over the last decade or so at AMD, he has held positions such as senior ASIC design manager and, most recently, system architect.

He started as an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) designer at ATI in 1996. That company was later acquired by AMD.

His AMD job description on LinkedIn states that he "completed hardware specification for the APU (CPU + GPU SoC) including cost, target die size, power budget and low-power strategies."

That jumble of acronyms could make him pretty valuable to Apple, which just beefed up its A5 series chips with the A5X SoC (system-on-a-chip), which packs a quad-core graphics engine. That chip is used in the third-generation iPad.

At Apple, he joins AMD alumni Raja Koduri and Bob Drebin, both formerly AMD CTOs.

So, does this mean Apple is going to adopt AMD processors in future MacBook Airs? Probably not. Again, it's more likely Apple needs his graphics chip expertise for its own Apple-branded silicon.

And remember, Apple already has a long history of using AMD GPUs (graphics processing units) in its MacBooks and Macs.

Via [Semiaccurate].