Apple's road to "changing cores" has tossed again, and the M1 chip heroes have been poached by Intel

The chief designer of Apple's M1 chip was poached by its old owner, Intel.

On January 6, Jeff Wilcox, Apple's M1 chip design director, announced at LinkedIn that he would leave Apple for a new position at Intel. He will serve as a leader in Intel Researcher and CTO for the Design Engineering Group, focusing on client-side SoC architecture. Jeff Wilson says he plans to work with Intel to build a groundbreaking SoC.

Jeff Wilcox was a key player in Apple's desktop and laptop product development. During his 8 years as Director of Mac System Architecture at Apple, he was responsible for system architecture, signal integrity, and power integrity of Mac systems. He was also part of Apple's M1 team, and he played a key role in Apple's transition from Intel to M1 chips.

In a LinkedIn post, Jeff Wilcox announced his departure from Apple last December, saying he was looking for new opportunities and reviewing his work at Apple:

It's been an incredible journey, and I'm incredibly proud of what I've accomplished during my time at Apple, culminating in the transformation of Apple chips with the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max soc. I will miss all my Apple colleagues and friends deeply, but I look forward to the next journey that begins early next year. Joining Intel this time, Jeff Wilcox actually returned to his old club. Prior to joining Apple, he worked at Intel from 2010 to 2013 as a personal computer chipset principal engineer.

Intel's "love-hate entanglement" with Apple

This recruitment is another step in Intel's talent program. Intel has improved its employee compensation structure and invested $2.4 billion to attract new talent.

Since CEO Pat Gelsinger took the helm of Intel, the company has hired multiple employees from rivals such as AMD, Nvidia and Apple and is focusing on graphics as the company prepares to launch Xe's high-performance graphics architecture.

The hiring comes at a time when Intel is facing unprecedented competition to develop pc chips. Apple's Mac products used to rely on Intel's chips. But in June 2020, Apple announced that it was abandoning Intel processors in favor of ARM-based chips.

In November 2020, Apple officially released the M1 processor. By the end of the year, Apple had launched a total of three products equipped with M1 chips, the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini; last October, Apple released the M1's advanced model, the more powerful M1 Pro and M1 Max. The release of these two chips marks another breakthrough in Apple's self-developed chip road. The M1 processor, the M1 Pro and M1 Max, are acclaimed for their performance, compatibility, and power efficiency.

Intel has been working hard in recent years to improve its chip design. New CEO Pat Gelsinger has made beating Apple's laptop a top priority. Intel is working on a new chip that claims to rival Apple's recent breakthroughs. Jeff Wilcox, who was poached this time, could become a key leader in Intel's plans.

Pat Gelsinger said last October that he hopes to win back Apple's business in the future by creating "better chips" than Apple can make. He is planning to ensure that Intel's products are "better than theirs" and said Intel has a more open and vibrant ecosystem.

Earlier this week, Intel unveiled a new Core i9 processor designed for laptops, which the company said was faster than Apple's M1 Max chips for the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.

Several engineers have been lost

Can Apple's chip transformation go smoothly?

Apple's chip team is led by Johny Srouji, Apple's vice president of hardware technology, and it's unclear whether Jeff Wilcox's departure will have a big impact on the future development of Apple's chips.

From another point of view, this also shows that Apple has made a lot of progress in the chip industry dominated by Intel, so much so that Intel has begun to compare its chips with the best chips of the Mac and has carried out some poaching actions.

In fact, in the past two years, Apple's chip team has lost some talent. Earlier, three engineers left Apple to start a new chip company called Nuvia, which was eventually acquired by Qualcomm. Apple is currently in a legal dispute with one of the engineers, Gerard Williams.

Judging from some of Apple's recent actions, the loss of technical talent may have affected the company's development. A week ago, the US "Forbes" website reported that Apple rarely issued huge bonuses to engineers in order to prevent brain drain. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple recently notified some engineers in the chip design, hardware, and some software and operation departments that special bonuses will be issued to them in the form of restricted shares. This "unplanned income" ranges from $50,000 to $180,000. Many engineers received about $80,000, $100,000 or $120,000 worth of Apple stock.

Apple's regular compensation package includes base salary, stock rewards and cash rewards, which are not included in this award. Apple sometimes gives extra cash prizes to employees, but this time stock rewards are uncommon and the timing is unexpected, people familiar with the matter said.

Now, under the leadership of Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technology, Apple's chip team has proven itself to be strong. But it remains to be seen how much the departure of these technical talents will affect Apple's coremaking progress.

What is certain is that Apple's chip transformation will continue.

A new report from the Business Times shows that Apple's M2 chip will be unveiled in the second half of 2022, and the M2 will drive the MacBook Air as well as the new Mac mini, iMac and Mac Pro computers. The higher-end M2 Pro /M2 Max models will be unveiled in the first half of 2023. The chips will use TSMC's 4nm manufacturing process. In contrast, the current M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max series uses a 5nm process.

Source: AI Frontline