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We've learned more details about Apple's new 'GPU Design Center' in Orlando, Florida, following our reporting from earlier this week.
Sources told MacRumors that the engineers Apple hired recently were not laid off from AMD, but were instead actively recruited -- largely via their LinkedIn profiles. Apple is said to have learned that many of AMD's 3D graphics patents were issued from its Orlando offices and targeted this area specifically. AMD has job listings for its Orlando offices to fill several of these recently vacated positions.
The temporary office space that Apple has leased for the new team in Orlando is located very close to AMD's campus in the city, though Apple is reportedly building permanent offices as well. Apple hired more than twenty employees from AMD and recruited more than that, with Apple reportedly looking to build the GPU team up to roughly forty engineers.
The newly hired employees are said to be reporting to the Austin-based former Intrinsity team that Apple acquired two years ago. Intrinsity technology was used in the A4 processor, and their expertise has contributed to Apple's more recent chips as well.
With its hiring of these 3D graphics specialists, Apple is likely working to redevelop its 3D graphics capabilities in its iOS devices. The company has made a number of acquisitions in recent years to revamp its chip design capabilities, and this new team would seem to supplement those efforts.
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The reason why ARM performance has increased so quickly is the same reason why CPU performance improved so quickly during the 90s and early 2000s: because they were able to take advantage of pipelining, superscalar, out of order, and speculative execution. ARM couldn't take advantage of those things until recent years because of power and size requirements of the chips. Intel and AMD already had these things implemented in their x86 chips, so it's been much harder to improve single threaded performance. ARM will soon face this same problem once it implements all the "low hanging fruit" chip features.
When it comes to competing in the high performance market, the advantage of the ARM architecture declines dramatically. The debate over what instruction set architecture is best should be left in the last decade. Instruction sets don't matter much anymore. The future is about who implements heterogeneous computing the best.
Macintosh software is a part of their entertainment and devices division? News to me.
I think you're over-romanticizing the rise of ARM and exaggerating x86's faults. ARM's rise owes a lot to all the money pouring into it. More money means more engineering and it also means higher demands. TDPs have also been going up, based solely on the principle that your processor is on less and your average usage is still constant.
Meanwhile, x86, an already mature technology, has always had the high performance requirements in a relatively static TDP. It's also been converted into a mobile platform that can finally compete with ARM on a performance/watt basis.
Yes, it took several years for Intrinsity and PA Semi to crank out Swift. Expect the same time-frame for a custom GPU implementation.
He's talking about Melbourne, FL silly. Its an hour away from Orlando.
So I wonder what spurs this move for Apple to create its own GPU design center. What are they looking for that Imgtech has not provided them? What are they going to use these resources to do?