Google acquires another former Apple chip designer

A logo is pictured at Google's European Engineering Center in Zurich April 16, 2015.REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

Google has acquired former Apple chip designer John Bruno to create processing chips for their future devices.

Engadget has learned via The Information that Google has acquired Apple's former chip designer Bruno. Bruno founded and managed Apple's silicon competitive analysis group, which made the iPhone and iPad devices stay years ahead of their rivals.

While there is no news of what Bruno might be doing for Google, it is speculated that he and a veteran team from Qualcomm (which Google also acquired recently) will be spearheading a project which will see Google's own line of custom phone processors similar to Apple.

Bruno initially started with the veteran processing chip maker ATI. Several years later, he rose to the rank of chief engineer over at AMD and created AMD's Fusion processors.

Currently, Google's only in-house silicon chip is the Pixel Visual Core imaging chip which is used with the Google Pixel 2 smartphone. With Bruno working for them, it is also speculated that Google might be able to make a central processing unit (CPU) chip with artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators or display controllers.

Bruno is not the only one who has defected from Apple. Earlier in June, Google hired Manu Gulati. According to the report by Variety, Gulati was also a veteran chip architect from Apple. Gulati spearheaded Apple's own chip development for almost eight years. Gulati also changed his job description on his Linkedin profile as Google's Lead "SoC" (systems on a chip) Architect.

Gulati started working for Apple in 2009 and contributed greatly to the creation of custom chips for the iPhone, iPad, and the Apple TV.

Apple officially started using their premium A4 chips in 2010. On the other hand, Google's current line of processing chips comes from Qualcomm which was used as the Google Pixel line of phones' CPU.