Apple Hires Away Top Samsung CPU Designer to Build Custom Apple
Chips  Apple just took a big step toward upping its chip-making
game, and took a big swipe at Samsung in the process. According
to the Wall Street Journal, Cupertino's hired away Jim Mergard,
a well respected and vastly experienced engineer, from the
Korean company.  The move is a big deal for a few reasons.
First, it signifies Apple's commitment to designing its own
chips. Its A6 chip in the iPhone 5 was its first chip to use its
own custom core. While Apple had been using chips customized for
its products (the A4, A5, A5X, etc.), those were built on ARM's
architecture—the Cortex-A8 and A9. In simple terms, Apple had
been just tweaking things here and there with the blueprints,
but with the A6, it built the chip design from the ground up
using just ARM's reference designs, not its ready-made cores.
That is a very big deal in the world of chip design, and it's
what let Apple boost the A6's performance and battery life at
once.  How does Mergard f