Apple’s senior iPhone chip designer, Gerard Williams III, has left the company after nine years of work with the iPhone maker, according to CNET. Williams may not have been well-known outside of Apple, but he did hold a very important position because he was the drive and push to designing more chips in-house.
To put it into perspective, Williams led the development of all Apple processors from the A7 chip, which appeared in the iPhone 5S, all the way to A12X that’s currently inside Apple’s latest iPad Pros.
CNET points that A7 was the first 64-bit processor for mobile devices. The chip made its debut in the iPhone 5S, forcing Qualcomm to release a 64-bit bit chip of its own. While Williams lead the processor design, he was also in charge of the layout for Apple’s systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) in the recent years. Essentially, he was the one behind the placement of SOCs’ components, such as the CPU and GPU.
At this time, it is unclear why Williams left the company. He has yet to update his LinkedIn page as well. If we hear any update, we will update this report.
