Key M1 Mac Engineer Departs Apple for Intel

[MacRumors]

Apple's former Director of Mac System Architecture Jeff Wilcox this week announced that he has left Apple to take on a new role at Intel. As noted on LinkedIn (via Tom's Hardware), Wilcox was part of Apple's M1 team and he had a key role in the transition from Intel chips to Apple silicon.

Wilcox's profile says that he "led the transition" for all Macs to Apple silicon, and prior to that, he developed the SoC and system architecture for the T2 coprocessor used in Intel Macs.

Director of the Mac System Architecture team that included all system architecture, signal integrity and power integrity for Mac systems. Led the transition for all Macs to Apple Silicon beginning with M1 chip, and developed the SoC and system architecture behind the T2 coprocessor before that.

When Wilcox announced his departure from Apple in December, he said that he was pursuing a new opportunity and that he was proud of what he had accomplished at Apple.

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.

Wilcox spent eight years working at Apple, and as of this week, he is the Design Engineering Group CTO at Intel. Wilcox says that he will be responsible for the architecture of all SoCs for all Intel client segments. Prior to working for Apple, Wilcox was at Intel where he served as a principal engineer on PC chipsets, and prior to that, he worked at Magnum Semiconductor and Nvidia.

The Apple silicon team is led by Johny Srouji, Apple's vice president of hardware technologies, and it's not clear if Wilcox's departure will have much impact on the development of Apple silicon chips going forward. Apple is well into its Apple silicon transition and is expected to complete it in 2022 with the launch of new Mac Pro and iMac Pro machines that use Apple silicon chips.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger in October said that he hopes to win back Apple's business in the future by creating "a better chip" than Apple can make. He also said that he is planning to ensure that Intel's products are "better than theirs," and that Intel has a more open and "vibrant" ecosystem. "I'm going to fight hard to win Tim's business in this area," he said.

Intel earlier this week introduced a new Core i9 processor designed for laptops, and the company has claimed that it is faster than Apple's M1 Max chip used in the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.

Article Link: Key M1 Mac Engineer Departs Apple for Intel

 

[ProVideo]

I am fine with this. I am happy Apple is making their own chip, but I also want to see Intel succeed. I own shares in both.

 

[Cosmosent]

NOT Rocket Science, he saw that the stock had probably max'd-out, & now has very little additional, if any, upside.

So he moved on.

Cook got what he wanted, a Prop'd-Up AAPL stock ... now, he must suffer the consequences !

There will be a lot more defections !

 

[Ethosik]

I am fine with this. I am happy Apple is making their own chip, but I also want to see Intel succeed. I own shares in both.

I want to see Intel improve as well, as someone that still prefers Intel in my Windows PCs and not AMD for compatibility, Intel has performed better than my AMD tests. I also want to see Apple Silicon get much better too! Hopefully this doesn't hurt Apple too much.

 

[hasanahmad]

Folks who jump like this are not looking to cherish their legacy which is a major shift in industry , they are just looking at money and knowing Intel , this guy will find out that he cannot change intel’s work culture

 

[Karma*Police]

Anyone who’s ever worked a corporate job knows this will have zero impact at Apple. Depending on how good he really is, he might have an impact at Intel considering his new title. The irony is, he was already at Intel but nobody recognized his skills so he moved on while Intel has cratered. So typical of corporate… overlook true talent for a** kissers.

 

[mi7chy]

Great career move from Principle Engineer then Director @ Apple to CTO @ Intel. There's no company loyalty towards employees so he did the right thing.

 

[Freeangel1]

HA HA HA!!!! FUNNY!!!

Your Joking right??

He knows where the future is.

X86 and Windows 11

Not the closed garden of Mac.

 

[temende]

Surprised the M1 t-shirt didn't change his mind.

 

[ian87w]

Well well, good for intel. Hopefully this means Windows PCs can get up to speed to what ARM platform has been offering (cool running fanless machines).

Now we know why intel was so confident in their presentation of beating the M1 Max. Hopefully this will bear fruit and not being self sabotaged by intel’s own execs.

 

[cmaier]

HA HA HA!!!! FUNNY!!!

Your Joking right??

He knows where the future is.

X86 and Windows 11

Not the closed garden of Mac.

CPU designers don’t choose where they work based on what operating system the chip will run.

 

[nwcs]

People move between jobs, not sure why this is of much interest to anyone/ I'm sure there are several ready to take their place.

 

[MrGimper]

That's awkward

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Hopefully he can do equally good work back at Intel again, and help them advance in the future. If this current gen iMac is the last Apple to be compatible with professional design & engineering applications, it'll be a real shame.

 

[Eduardo75890]

I am fine with this. I am happy Apple is making their own chip, but I also want to see Intel succeed. I own shares in both.

Yuck I hate Intel. I’m on Team Apple and team AMD for chips.

 

[Westside guy]

Something's wrong here. A CTO with actual technical chops? Usually they're just promoted managers who like to throw buzzwords around. Was it backwards day at Intel?

 

[cmaier]

Something's wrong here. A CTO with actual technical chops? Usually they're just promoted managers who like to throw buzzwords around. Was it backwards day at Intel?

In the CPU industry all the CTOs are technical.

 

[mi7chy]

Well well, good for intel. Hopefully this means Windows PCs can get up to speed to what ARM platform has been offering (cool running fanless machines).

The new 2021 Macbooks have fans with a default fan curve that triggers around 100C. Plus credit goes to TSMC 5nm.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Folks who jump like this are not looking to cherish their legacy which is a major shift in industry , they are just looking at money and knowing Intel , this guy will find out that he cannot change intel’s work culture

"Prior to working for Apple, Wilcox was at Intel where he served as a principal engineer on PC chipsets"

How many people in this thread even bothered to read the article?

 

[paulovsouza]

I think completion is great, and getting some new talent in always stimulates innovation. Hopefully Apple finds someone better, with fresh eyes. I think they’ve taken leaps, but you can only make the chip so small, and add so many transistors.

 

[fivenotrump]

There goes good hope for M2. Hopefully he did not join Intel.

Not while JS is around. What?

 

[CWallace]

At this point, Apple has likely completed the move of all their Macs to Apple Silicon internally, so now we just wait for the final models to ship.

Per the article, that move was driven by Wilcox so now that it is over, he may very well be ready for a new challenge - likely the reason he left Intel for Apple eight years ago.

There is a downside to Apple for losing a talented SoC engineer, but Apple's talent pool is really deep in that area so his loss, while felt, won't de-rail Apple Silicon on macOS.

 

[cmaier]

There goes good hope for M2. Hopefully he did not join Intel.

Did you read the article? He did join intel.

I also find it amusing how every time someone leaves it’s “the person responsible for apple silicon.” So many people who did all the work themselves, apparently!

 

[goobot]

If he’s responsible for T2 then no real loss

 

[iBluetooth]

I want to see Intel improve as well, as someone that still prefers Intel in my Windows PCs and not AMD for compatibility, Intel has performed better than my AMD tests. I also want to see Apple Silicon get much better too! Hopefully this doesn't hurt Apple too much.

All the major players are doing their own in-house CPU design's by now. Microsoft and Google will have custom chips in their PC's after a few years (Msft already had PC's with Qualcomm ARM chips). Amazon is doing it in their AWS and they might enter the PC business at some point. In a few years, x86 may be in minority and ARM64 the leading architecture.