Apple loses top chipman

John Bruno moves to Google.

ATI and later AMD started the great trend of letting journalists talk to actual engineers. Nvidia followed, and soon I had the chance to meet John Bruno, who this week is leaving Apple to shift to Google.

John Bruno had a tough job at ATI as he had to come up with a good chipset and back in mid-2005 that was not that easy. When I met him, he had the patience to explain to me the pieces of the engineering puzzle.

After the ATI acquisition, Bruno worked at AMD. His last work was the Trinity Fusion APU. In the CPU world everyone knows Jim Keller, who is now at Tesla. Bruno worked with Keller and is in that league.

Since mid-2012 he worked at Apple and has been working on chips since the Apple A7. Since everyone’s job at Apple is very secretive, it is hard to know what exactly what he did.

One of the rumours was that his work included the internal performance analysis and that the ex-journalist Anand Shimpi was part of that venture. Whatever he was working on, and most likely it was the SoC, he has managed to escape Apple for good.

According to Linkedin, his new job might have something to do with Google silicon. It can go in two directions and most likely Bruno will help Google make its own SoC. The second thing that comes to mind would be some AI effort that Google is trying to improve.

Google has introduced the special Pixel Visual Core and wanted to go down that road.  Google will pick the Snapdragon 845 for its next generation Pixel phone refresh in fall 2018, but it also wants to make its phones unique and desirable against the competition. Hardware which is unavailable to others can certainly help.