Gerard Williams III, lead designer of Apple’s custom iOS chips from A7 to A12X, has left the company, according to CNET. The reason for his departure is unknown, but the article says his work will “likely show upon in future Apple processors as he’s listed as the inventor on more than 60 Apple patents.”
In fact, in recent years, Williams’ responsibilities has grown beyond leading the design of the custom CPU cores for Apple’s chips to overseeing the layout of the various parts of the system-on-a-chip, or SoC, inside the company’s mobile devices. It’s standard for chip designers to pack more and more features — like the CPU brains of the device, GPU graphics and memory — onto the same physical package to improve battery life and reduce the size of the chips, notes CNET.
Among Williams’ work, the eight-core A12X Bionic, which appears in the latest iPad Pros, features four performance cores and four efficiency cores for up to 35 percent faster single-core performance and a new performance controller for simultaneous use of all eight cores for an up to 90% boost during multi-threaded tasks.
