AMD Hires Back Former Apple OS X And Qualcomm Engineers

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AMD has made two big re-hires, one being Wayne Meretsky, a former technical lead for OS X at Apple. Another is Charles Matar, a former employee who went to Qualcomm and has now been made AMD’s vice president of System-on-Chip Development. Both men bring chip design expertise, which AMD sorely needs if it hopes to remain competitive with the likes of Nvdia.

Meretsky worked on the Mac back in the 90s, and he is now AMD’s vice president of Software IP Development. This isn’t the first time AMD has hired from Apple’s talent pool.

Apple’s Jim Keller joined AMD last August after working as a director on the ‘A’ series processors that power the iPhone and iPad. “Sunnyvale, California-based AMD hopes to increase sales in markets such as communications, microservers, digital signs and stripped down “thin client” computers,” reports Reuters. AMD also wants to position itself against Nvidia’s Tegra mobile processors.

A recent Apple job listing for the Mac engineering team asked for experience in Intel, AMD and/or Nvidia GPUs. The current Mac Pro lineup uses AMD Radeon graphics, but Apple uses a combination of Nvdia and Intel in all of its other Macs. A rumor from 2011 claimed that Apple almost used AMD processors in the MacBook Air, but Intel’s chips won because of their better battery performance.

Source: Reuters

Via: ZDnet

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