Apple has reportedly hired at least a dozen AMD engineers for its Orlando offices over the past few months. The hiring spree seems to have been focused on graphics guys, including GPU engineers, hardware engineers and others.

It was probably great news for some ex-AMD people, who lost their jobs earlier this year, in the latest round of AMD cuts. Apple seems to be completely rebuilding its Orlando team and it is now going a step further. It has posted a new job listing for site managers to head its GPU teams in Orlando and Cupertino, reports MacRumors.com.

It seems like a very interesting development indeed. Apple has stepped up its chip development efforts in recent years, culminating in the custom core A6 application processor. However, although the CPU cores were custom designed to meet Apple’s needs, A6 series chips still feature off-the-shelf Imagination Technologies graphics, which were used in all A-series SoCs.

Apple’s next move might be custom graphics, developed by disgruntled AMD guys. We wouldn’t be surprised if it manages to poach some Nvidia people as well.