Back at CES January 2012 the name John Bruno popped up in conversation and we learned that the chap left AMD and was chilling out before his next big move.

At that time we suspected that Intel might get him, but it turns out that as of July 2012 John Bruno, the engineer behind the first IGP chipsets, Trinity APU and many other interesting projects in ATI and later AMD went to Apple.

Bruno joins Apple as system architect and do not forget that Raja Koduri is at Apple since leaving AMD as CTO of graphics product group in 2009. We later learned that Apple mobile graphics that are usually very hard to match by the competition are one of his achievements and this is why A4, A5 or A5X chips get so big, as the graphics cores behind are really fast and bulky. Bruno’s Linked in webpage has confirmed that he is a system architect at Apple.

If I recall correctly, we met John Bruno while he was working on ATI Radeon 9100 IGP (RS300) chipset and through the years he was responsible for ATI Radeon 9100 Pro IGP (RS350) DirectX 9 Pentium 4 northbridge, ATI Radeon Xpress 200 (RS482) - DX9 Graphics AMD HyperTransport Northbridge, AMD 690G (RS690) - DX9 Graphics AMD HyperTransport Northbridge, AMD 780G/790GX (RS780) - DX10 Graphics AMD HyperTransport 3 Northbridge and AMD 880G/890GX (RS880) - DX10 Graphics AMD HyperTransport 3 Northbridge.

His last job at AMD was „Responsibility for all aspects of the definition and delivery of the 2012 Comal platform that includes the Trinity Fusion APU and the platform will get out in 2012 but much later than it was projected. His departure in late 2011 might have had something to do with it.

Apple wins another high profile system architect, making its position even stronger in both ARM CPU and GPU field. We wish John all the best in his new post-Jobs Apple hippy environment at Cupertino.