Apple's M1 Mac Director of Chip Architecture left Apple to join Intel

Webmaster's House (ChinaZ.com) Jan. 7: Jeff Wilcox, Apple's former director of Mac system architecture, announced this week that he has left Apple for a new role at Intel, according to MacRumors. As the LinkedIn page shows, Wilcox is part of Apple's M1 team, and he played a key role in the transition from Intel chips to Apple's self-developed chips.

Image from Apple

Wilcox's profile says he "led" the transition from all Macs to Apple chips, and before that, he developed SoCs and system architectures for the T2 coprocessor used in Intel Mac computers.

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

Wilcox has been with Apple for 8 years, and from this week, he served as chief technology officer in the design engineering group at Intel. Wilcox said he will be responsible for the architecture of all SoCs across all Intel's customer base. Prior to working for Apple, Wilcox was a principal engineer at Intel as a PC chipset, and before that, he worked at Magnum Semiconductor and Nvidia.

The Apple chip team is led by Johny Srouji, Apple's vice president of hardware technology, and it's unclear whether Wilcox's departure will have a big impact on the future development of Apple's chips. Apple has successfully completed the transition to Apple's self-developed chips, and is expected to complete the transition in 2022, introducing new Mac Pro and iMac Pro models that use Apple chips.

Intel's CEO said in October that he hopes to win back Apple's business in the future by creating "better chips" than Apple can make. He also said 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 try to win Tim's business in this space," he said.

Intel unveiled a new Core i9 processor designed specifically for laptops earlier this week, which the company claims is faster than the M1Max chip apple uses in the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.