Google Poaches Apple's Well-Regarded Chip Designer John Bruno

According to a report from The Information , which details Google’s plan to grow its chip development efforts, which in turn is costing Appl...

According to a report from The Information, which details Google’s plan to grow its chip development efforts, which in turn is costing Apple some considerable talent. The report explains that Google has hired several key chip engineers from Apple, including the well-regarded Apple chip expert John Bruno.

Bruno has been working on the silicon architecture for iPhones since 2012. Prior to joining Apple and helping it build ARM-based mobile chips, Bruno was working with AMD in charge of the Fusion processors for PCs. Bruno has confirmed the move on his LinkedIn page, where he says he’s working as a System Architect at Google.

Bruno founded and manages Apple's silicon competition analysis team, which tries to keep the company ahead of competitors in terms of chip performance. In the past year, there have been several experienced chip engineers who switched from Apple to Google, including Manu Gulati, Wonjae Choi, and Tayo Fadelu.

These moves indicate that Google is trying to keep up the pace with Apple, which started designing its own chips from 2010. Google said it would sell to other companies what it called the TPU chip, Cloud Tensor Processing Units, which will allow them to reap the benefits from its deep learning tool set, TensorFlow. 

According to Jim McGregor, an analyst at Tirias Research who spoke to The Information said that in fact, Google's first mobile chip may come out soon. The Mountain View-based tech giant can build a versatile SoC chip in six months, McGregor said. All these suggest that Google is making own-branded chips for Google's Pixel smartphones.

Via 9to5Mac And MacRumors, Image Credit MyBroadband