One of Apple's key semiconductor engineers has left the company, as Apple's ambitions to design chips for the iPhone continue to grow, CNET reporters citing their informants. Gerard Williams III, senior director of platform architecture, quit in February after nine years with the Cupertino giant.
Although not widely known outside of Apple, Mr. Williams has led the development of all of Apple's own SoCs, from the A7 (the world's first commercially available 64-bit ARM-based chip) to the A12X Bionic used in Apple's latest iPad Pro tablets. . Apple claims that this latest single-chip system makes the iPad faster than 92% of the world's personal computers.
In recent years, Gerard Williams' responsibilities have gone beyond directing the development of CPU cores for Apple chips to being responsible for the placement of blocks on the company's single-chip systems. Modern mobile processors combine on a single chip a lot of different computing units (CPU, GPU, neuromodule, signal processor, and so on), modems, I/O and security systems.
The departure of such a specialist is a serious loss for Apple. His work is likely to be used in future Apple processors for a long time to come, because Gerard Williams is listed as the author of more than 60 Apple patents. Some of these relate to power management, in-memory data compression, and multi-core processor technologies. Mr. Williams is leaving the company just as Apple is ramping up its efforts to create new proprietary components and is hiring a slew of engineers around the world. According to the latest rumors, Apple is working on its own graphics accelerators, 5G cellular modems and power management units.
In 2010, Apple introduced its first proprietary chip, the A4. Since then, the company has been releasing new A-series processors for its mobile devices every year and is even reportedly planning to use its own chips in Mac computers starting in 2020. Apple's decision to develop original processors has given it more control over the devices, as well as allowing it to stand out more from the competition.
For years, the company has only made its own chips for the iPhone and iPad, but lately it has been making moves to produce more and more components in-house. For example, the company has developed its own Bluetooth chip that powers the AirPods wireless headset, as well as the security chips that store fingerprints and other data on the MacBook.
Gerard Williams is not the first prominent Apple engineer to leave the custom chip business run by Johnny Srouji. For example, two years ago, Apple SoC architect Manu Gulati moved along with some other engineers to a similar position at Google. After Gulati left Apple, Williams assumed the role of overall oversight of the SoC architecture. Prior to joining Apple in 2010, Williams worked for 12 years at ARM, a company whose designs are used in virtually all mobile processors. He has not yet moved to any new company.
Source: 3dnews.ru