According to Reuters, three former semiconductor executives of Apple jointly established a startup.

The company, called NUVIA, was founded by Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati and John Bruno, who previously worked on Apple's iPhone chip development. The company aims to compete with current industry leaders Intel and AMD, and they are currently developing processors codenamed Phoenix.

Williams served as chief architect for Apple's central processing unit and system-on-chip for more than nine years. Gulati has been with Apple for eight years and is involved in the development of on-chip mobile systems. Bruno has worked in Apple's platform architecture team for five years. Before joining NUVIA, Gulati and Bruno also worked at Google.

Williams said their plans to create a faster, more energy-efficient, and more secure chip than the industry's existing data center processors. Nuvia aims to design powerful chips for small battery-powered smart devices such as the iPhone and further apply them to large data center servers with high power consumption.

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights&Strategies, said that although NUVIA is a new entrant to the industry, the curriculum of its founding team indicates that it is a strong new company. He said that the three founders have improved performance for each generation of Apple's chips, and gained valuable experience in chip development and design.

According to reports, NUVIA has raised $53 million from Dell and several Silicon Valley companies, which will help it expand from 60 employees to approximately 100 employees by the end of the year.