Apple has lost a key hardware executive as the senior director in platform architecture Gerard Williams III has stepped down from the company. Williams III left Apple a couple of months ago after working at the company for nine years.
Apple announced its first branded chip back in 2010, which was the A4 for the iPad that was sold that year. And then Apple released new A-series processors for its mobile devices every year since then. And Apple has also built a Bluetooth chip for AirPods to connect to other Apple devices and security chips for saving fingerprints.
Williams III oversaw the development of Apple processors from the A7, which originally debuted in the iPhone 5S in 2013 until the A12X in the most recent iPad Pros. The latest chip makes iPads faster than 92% of the world’s computers.
According to CNET, Williams III initially led the design of custom CPU cores for Apple’s chips and then oversaw the layout of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) inside mobile devices. Apple’s chip division is led by SVP of Hardware Technology Johny Srouji.
Apple has been reportedly planning to build its own desktop processors. It is unclear whether Williams III worked on the design of desktop processors at Apple. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Apple wanted to replace Intel’s CPUs in Macs by 2020.
Williams III is named on 60 patents. These patents range from power management, multicore processor, caching systems, and memory compression.
Prior to joining Apple, Williams III worked at ARM as a fellow (1998-2010), a design team lead at Texas Instruments (1996-1997), and a graduate intern at Intel (summer 1995). It is currently unknown where Williams III is working next.
