Apple loses key engineer who led development of iPhone and iPad processors

Apple has lost a key member of its chipset development team.

Gerard Williams III, who was the senior director in platform architecture, reportedly left Apple last month according to CNET. Williams worked at Apple for 9 years and led the development of every Apple processor from A7 to the latest A12X. He took over Manu Gulati's role as the senior chip architect in 2017 after the latter joined Google.

Williams' departure is a loss for Apple as the company is increasing efforts to develop custom chipsets for its mobile devices. Williams' work is likely to show up in future Apple chipsets as he is listed as an inventor on more than 60 patents relating to power management, memory compression and multicore processor technology.

Apple recently shifted its modem chip engineering team into the in-house hardware technology group to place higher priority n designing its own radio modem chips. Apple is also said to be developing custom chips for the Mac lineup and Apple Car system. For the iPhone, Apple is developing its own battery-saving chip and GPU so that it will have more control over the hardware of the iPhone and iPad.

Source: CNET