Jim Mergard, a former chip designer at Samsung, has just announced that he’s leaving his job at Samsung for a new opportunity at Apple. According to the Wall Street Journal, Jim’s last project at Samsung was a high-profile AMD chip, which was to be used in low-end mobile computing devices. This chip went under the codename “Brazos”. It is also rumored that Jim Mergard worked on ARM chips for servers at Samsung, but after Apple pulled the plug on their Xserve servers, we highly doubt that we’ll see Mergard fulfilling the same roles at Apple.
So, why do we care that Mr. Mergard has joined Apple? Simple, Samsung currently produces chips for all of Apple’s iOS devices. In fact, Samsung just recently opened a factory in Austin, Texas, which is responsible for creating these chips. Now that Mergard has joined Apple, the company now has another high profile engineer that can help them transition from partially relying on Samsung to creating its own chips in-house.
Source: Wall Street Journal
