Apple’s brains drain into Intel and Microsoft

Apple Park, Cupertino. © iStock.

On January 6, news came out of Jeff Wilcox’s departure for Intel. Wilcox was director of system architecture for Macs for eight years and led the transition to ARM M1 chips. Wilcox left Intel for Apple in 2013, and is now returning to Intel to work on the maker’s SoC architecture. “I could not be more thrilled to be back working with the amazing teams there to help create groundbreaking SoCs. Great things are ahead!” he declared. Apple hasn’t yet announced who will replace him as director of Mac System Architecture.

More recently, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has hired Mike Filippo, a semiconductor designer at Apple, to bolster its own server chip development efforts. Before moving to Cupertino, Filippo had spent ten years at ARM as a chip architect. This poaching suggests that Microsoft wants to accelerate its efforts to create server chips for its Azure cloud services. The company’s main rivals, Amazon and Alphabet (Google), are making similar moves. A report from late December 2021 said Apple was taking steps to prevent poaching, including offering top engineers stock bonuses of up to $180,000, which obviously wasn’t enough in this case. Apple’s new year is not off to a good start...

⇨ AppleInsider, Mike Peterson, “Apple loses second key chip engineer, this time to Microsoft.”

2022-01-12