A nice hire for Apple's chip business: The company has hired former AMD chief technology officer Bob Drebin as Senior Director, the Inquirer reports.
Drebin specializes in graphics chips: He joined AMD after it acquired ATI in 2006; there, he "led the architecture and design of many of ATI award-winning graphics processors," according to his old AMD bio. Before that, he worked at ArtX, where he "was instrumental in development of the graphics component for the Nintendo Game Cube." And he worked at Silicon Graphics for nine years.
Why does Apple want a graphics chip guru? Beyond its Mac computers, its iPhone and iPod touch are already huge hit gaming machines, and it's possible that Apple TV could be a game platform at some point, too. And, of course, there's no doubt the company is working on new machines we don't know about. Apple bulked up its chip business by acquiring PA Semi about a year ago.
