• Tesla hires CPU architect and Apple director Peter Bannon
    3 replies, posted
[QUOTE]If there’s indeed a poaching chess game going on between Tesla and Apple, it would appear the automaker is winning in acquiring quality pieces. Just a few week after we exclusively reported that Tesla hired legendary chip architect Jim Keller as new “Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering”, we now learn that Keller is joined by former DEC Alpha, PA Semi and until earlier this year Apple Director Peter Bannon. Before Keller left Apple for AMD in 2012, he and Bannon were leading Apple’s processor development since the Cupertino-based company bought their chip making firm PA Semi in 2008. The duo lead the development of Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, which powered most of the company’s mobile devices from 2010 to 2012. Keller then left to develop the Zen architecture at AMD, but Bannon stuck around and developed several other chips for Apple until leaving for Tesla to join Keller last week. ... A Bloomberg report came out late last year implying that Tesla could be looking to replace Mobileye’s tech based on an email conversation between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and high-profile hacker George “geohot” Hotz, who is building his own self-driving car platform. Following the report, Mobileye’s stock price took a 7% hit in a matter of hours, but Tesla came to the rescue and issued a statement calling Mobileye’s tech “best in the world at what it does” and saying that the company plans to “continue using” the firm’s EyeQ vision chips going forward. Tesla made those comments before hiring both Keller and Bannon, which will possibly raise a few eyebrows at NVIDIA and Mobileye. While it still looks unlikely that Tesla will engage in another resource-consuming project like making its own chips, fabless manufacturing, which means to design silicon in-house while outsourcing its manufacturing, is not impossible either. ... Now as for the “poaching war” between Tesla and Apple, it appears that the number of former senior Apple engineers now on Tesla’s engineering team is growing every month. They recently added Keller and Bannon, but there’s also Apple’s former alloy expert Charles Kuehmann now VP of Materials Engineering at Tesla (and SpaceX which is interesting), Doug Field, former VP of Mac Engineering at Apple and now VP of Engineering at Tesla, and Rich Heley, former Director of Alloy Engineering at Apple and now VP of Products at Tesla. [/QUOTE] [URL="http://electrek.co/2016/02/28/tesla-hires-chip-architecture-apples-pa-semi/"]Source[/URL]
Damn they're picking up every legend there is.
Hopefully this helps advancing their technology even further.
damn, that's some serious talent going to tesla. this can't be bad in any way
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