A former big-wig within IBM’s PowerPC processor division, Apple employee Mark Papermaster will at long last begin actively working at his job as head of the iDevice group at Infinite Loop now that a settlement betwen the two companies has been achieved. Some debate has taken place over whether a relevant contract expires before mid-June, but a press release from Apple today specified April 24th as Papermaster’s start date.

Originally hired in October of last year, Papermaster has been a key player in several divisions at IBM’s technical centers — notably its PowerPC development team — over the years and was vital to the project that brought the POWER4 architecture to the Mac in the form of the PPC 970 “G5.”

Papermaster will replace Tony Fadell, who ran the iDevice Division through November and who remains a technical consultant with the company.

Many insiders, as well as the larger grapevine community, are extremely pleased by this news and have very high expectations of what the iDevice group will achieve under Mark Papermaster’s leadership.

In fact, we have heard that Papermaster was specifically brought on board to put the polishing touches on two new iPhones and a new iPod Touch model (bringing them to 3 and 2 models respectively) which will broaden the reach & appeal of both devices while dropping entry-level costs even further.

Stay tuned for much more on those rumors in the days ahead; the full text of the Apple press release regarding the lawsuit settlement with IBM follows on the next page.