Something seriously smoking be going on round Apple way if the latest story from The Inquirer (via MacRumors) is to be believed:

We’ve just heard from sources deep inside 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California that [Raja Koduri, AMD/ATI Chief Technology Officer, Graphics Product Group] is heading there.

So for those keeping score at home, this adds to:

• PA Semi lower-power PPC chipset designer: bought
• ARM cpu: licensed
• PowerVR GPU graphics core: licensed
• Mark Papermaster, IBM chip guru: hired
• Bob Drebin, AMD/ATI graphics guru: hired

Steve Jobs has said Apple is working on their own systems-on-chip for future iPhones and iPod touches. Looks like that work has got some serious hardware, and talent behind it.

Our only question is, what’s going to melt the universe first, the Hadron Collider, or whatever Apple’s got cooking up in their basement?

Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what’s most interesting is that it’s the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:

The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.

Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.