Tech and Web NEWS

Apple building chip design capability hires its dream team : Mark Papermaster, Bob Drebin and Raja Koduri

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:April 30, 2009

I believe that Apple is currently trying to develop their own low power processors for their consumer devices as part of bringing production in-house in order to reduce the number of product leaks that have run rampant this year alone, but I do not think that this is where they will stop.

Being the control freaks that they are, they may very well prepare themseleves to run OS X on their own processor that cannot be duplicated by another company and where OS X could not be tweaked to run on some other processor produced outside of Apple.

Apple Inc. is looking into building its own chipset and has even hired a team to work on “multifunction” mobile chips.

Apple could use the internally developed chips to sharply reduce the power consumption of its hit iPhone and iPod touch devices, and possibly add graphics circuitry to help its hardware play realistic game software and high-definition videos, wsj reported.

Apple recently hired Raja Koduri, who was formerly the chief technology officer of the graphics products group at chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., following in the footsteps of Bob Drebin, who had held the same title at AMD and is also now working for Apple.

Online job postings from Apple describe dozens of chip-related positions it is trying to fill, some with partial descriptions like “testing the functional correctness of Apple developed silicon, according to wsj.

Apple had hired Bob Drebin, former CTO of chipmaker AMD’s Graphic Products Group, it kicked off speculation that the iPhone maker is planning on designing its own chips.

Drebin was reported to have accepted a Senior Director position at the Cupertino, Calif. company based electronics maker. Drebin’s LinkedIn page lists him as a senior director at Apple.

In January, Apple announced that Mark Papermaster will be coming to Apple as senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on April 24. Papermaster, who comes to Apple from IBM, will lead Apple’s iPod and iPhone hardware engineering teams. The litigation between IBM and Mark Papermaster has been resolved.

Papermaster has 25 years of product and technology experience, and was previously a vice president at IBM. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Vermont in 1988. Papermaster is active with the University of Texas where he is a member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisory Council.

Apple’s acquisition of 150-person fabless chip design firm P.A Semi for $278 million last April, headed by microprocessor architecture veterans Dan Dobberpuhl and Jim Keller (brains behind the Digital Equipment Corp.)

In December Apple also chucked $4.8m in to British SoC developer Imagination Technologies, buying 3.6 per cent of a company ideally positioned to integrate powerful graphics into a new chip design.

Like this article! ‹ Ken Lewis ousted as chairman (But He&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#039;s Still CEO)- at Bank of America, Walter E. Massey new chairman Google AdWords charges $30,000 in 24 hours. ›
Share this Post: Get It Delivered To Your Inbox