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Amid the excitement over the A4 microprocessor designed in-house at Apple Inc. and used to power the iPad, it has emerged that a number of the internal design team have already left to form a startup.

Apple made a splash and posted a clear intent when it acquired P.A.Semiconductor Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) in April 2008 for $278 million in cash.

P.A. Semi, established in 2003 by industry veterans, was co-founded and led by Dan Dobberpuhl, the acclaimed lead designer of the DEC Alpha series of microprocessors, the StrongARM microprocessor, and a pioneering multicore system-on-chip at SiByte Inc.

It now transpires, according to a New York Times article, that former P.A. Semi engineers have been leaving Apple to form a startup said to be working on a server processor and with links to Cisco. Not much is known about Agnilux Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) except that the name is derived from the compound of the Sanskrit word for fire — agni — and the Latin word for light — lux.

Mark Hayter, system architect and chief operating officer at Agnilux, was a director at Apple from June 2008 to December 2008. At P.A. Semi Hayter was systems architect and vice president of hardware. Prior to that Hayter was principal systems architect at SiByte Inc. up until its acquisition by Broadcom Corp.

Amarjit Gill co-founded P.A.Semi with Dobberpuhl and served that company as executive vice president responsible for sales and business development. Gill lists himself on LinkedIn as founder of Agnilux.

One possibility is that the design team could be promising to reduce server power consumption by designing a multiprocessing ARM chip for Cisco, just like the internal team at Apple is believed to have worked with an ARM architectural license to improve power efficiency and extend battery life.

By: DocMemory
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