Most had assumed that it would be a few hundred people, but this figure would be about five percent of Apple's non-retail workforce.
According to Seeking Alpha's deepthroats, Apple started designing its own chips because Intel and AMD were still stuck in the PC era. Jobs needed chips that are powerful enough, but also very low on battery life.
Apple's A5 processor, which is under the bonnet of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S is twice as fast as the A4 in the current iPhone 4, but it slightly improves the battery life with eight hours of talk time. By dumping the harddrive and pushing for smaller, thinner, low powered chips, Apple is able to stick a computer into anything.
So far though it is all rumour. If Apple has chucked itself into the deep end of chip development it would appear to be missing the biggest trend in chip manufacturing, which is the shoving of a GPU and a CPU together.
If the old Stalinist era AMD and Intel carry on with their current policies trend, then their chips will sport graphics which are far superior to Apple and will be much lower power.
Apple, with its concentration on a single chip, might have been more locked into the PC era than it thought.