Key Apple Silicon chip designer has left for Intel

Apple has started off the new year with a bit of a whimper, as Jeff Wilcox has announced that he has left his role as the Director of the Mac System Architecture to join Intel. His departure to join a rival company is the latest in a string of withdrawals at Cupertino over the last few years, and Wilcox leaving also sees them losing their star chip designer and one of the leaders of the Apple Silicon team.

Jeff Wilcox might not be a household name of course, but for those familiar with the ins and outs of Apple, he led the transition for the company’s Macs to go from x86 to Apple Silicon with the Apple M1 chip. He was also part of the team who developed the Apple T2 security chip. Wilcox had announced his departure a couple of weeks back, stating:

“After an amazing eight years I have decided to leave Apple and pursue another opportunity. It has been an incredible ride and I could not be prouder of all we accomplished during my time there, culminating in the Apple Silicon transition with the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max SOCs and systems.

I will dearly miss all of my Apple colleagues and friends, but I am looking forward to the next journey which will start at the first of the year,” – Jeff Wilcox

He has since revealed that he’s actually back at Intel, where he had originally served as a lead architect between 2010 and 2013 prior to his role at Apple. According to his LinkedIn, he has started his new position as an Intel Fellow, Design Engineering Group CTO, Client SoC Architecture. It’s certainly a big catch for Intel, who historically have struggled with making their silicon more efficient and having the engineer who made its replacements in Macs should boost Intel’s developments.

As for Apple, it marks yet another high-profile departure from their team. They’ve been haemorrhaging key engineers now for the last couple of years; just last month it was reported that four engineers on its Apple Car project had left Cupertino. Prior to that, they had a very public and ugly spat with the founders of the startup Nuvia who were all ex-Apple engineers. Specifically, they tried to sue Gerard Williams III, who left Apple in 2019 to lead Nuvia as its CEO. Nuvia would later be acquired by Qualcomm last year.

Apple for their part is trying to convince their top talent from leaving. Bloomberg reported last month that Meta was also getting in on the act, trying to poach a number of Apple’s engineers. In response, Apple is offering anywhere from USD50,000 to USD180,000 in bonuses in the form of restricted stock. It’ll be curious to see just how effective their bonuses will be at keeping their staff though, with rival companies continuing to try and poach talent away.

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