Looks like Apple’s recent purchase of Anobit was just the first step in the company’s expansion into Israel. Reports coming out of the Israeli daily business newspaper Calcalist say that Apple is going to open a Research Center in Haifa by the end of next month. Apple is said to be looking over “several hundred resumes” for various engineering positions, mainly focused around “electrical circuits, analogue, and testing hardware (and verification).” In other words, expect Apple to continue designing their own chips and taking things to a whole new level. Looking back at Apple’s mobile devices, the first few iPhones used off the shelf components, specifically system on chips from their best friend Samsung. Things started to change with the iPhone 4, which used a slightly modified Samsung Hummingbird processor that Apple ended up calling the A4. The A5 that’s in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S is still made by Samsung, but it has a lot of custom parts that folks like EE|Times are still struggling to decode.
Back to Israel, why is it such an important country? It’s loaded with talented engineers. Intel’s Pentium 4 almost brought the company to its knees because it was incredibly bad at delivering both power efficiency and performance, but the Intel team in Israel came up with the Pentium M, codenamed “Banias”, that you might better recognize as Centrino. That architecture became the basis for the company’s chips for the next few years. This is where Johny Srouji steps in. He used to be the Senior Manager of Intel’s Isreali center, the one that saved Intel, but in March 2008 he joined Apple. According to his LinkedIn page he’s now Vice President of VLSI at Apple. VLSI stands for very-large-scale-integration, and according to Wikipedia it’s basically a fancy way of saying chip design.
Forget iOS versus Android, Apple is now competing against Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and ST-Ericsson. And best of all, whatever they come up with they get to keep in house.