Google buys firm of former Apple employees

Google's purchase of a firm staffed with former Apple employees is surrounded by mystery, according to AppleInsider. Agnilux is a small San Jose startup founded by a few former Apple employees, most of whom left the mothership right around the time of the P.A. Semi acquisition.

Other than that, nothing is known about the company. And I mean nothing -- the NYT's Bits blog even tried to do a drive-by of what they were up to, and came up with bupkis. It's probably something processor-related, but whatever it is, Agnilux is guarding it so closely that they won't even talk abstractly about what they're working on, for fear that someone will "take our intellectual property before we're ready." The closest NYT gets is "some kind of server."

Google has purchased the company, for a (surprise) undisclosed sum. What do they want with it? We have no idea -- Google already knows their way around server architecture, and it certainly seems like they're a little late to start installing new processors everywhere. Conspiracy money says that they really just wanted a nice chunk of Apple -- if that's the case, then with Agnilux on the payroll, they probably got what they wanted.

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Source: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/20/google_buys_my…

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Google's purchase of a firm staffed with former Apple employees is surrounded by mystery, according to AppleInsider. Agnilux is a small San...

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masternav

Actually AgniLux was spun off before the key players joined Apple, led by the PASemi marketing VP Amarjit Gill and a couple of others to work on server technologies - leading off with some stuff for Cisco. Amazing no one can find info on this - it was covered extensively by Appleinsider as the acquisition and final shake-out (Dobberpuhl retiring from Apple). They weren't "stealth" as InformationWeak put it - they were a start-up working on some interesting technologies for Cisco. Several PASemi engineers who came over initially to Apple, left after a month or two to work for Gill at AgniLux as well. So, not founded by former Apple employees - Gill and Hayter did not join Apple at the acquisition, they left prior. AgniLux however does have some staff that were at Apple for a short time.

April 22 2010 at 11:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Roberto

Agnilux engineers are best at PowerPC. They'll do best if they design a multicore PPC server with Google's specification, without paying inflated prices from AMCC, Freescale and IBM.

It is going to allow cloud services beyond our imagination. It's gonna be awesome.

April 22 2010 at 7:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

caleb

Something to do with Linux and chips and gold?

April 22 2010 at 6:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply