Text/JING Audit/Zi Yang Correction/Zhi Qiu
Apple launched its self-developed M1 chip at the end of 2020, and brought two new products, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, at the end of 2021. Apple officials said that it will take two years to popularize its own chips in the Mac product line and get rid of Intel's constraints, which is obviously not the result that Intel is willing to see.
In fact, Intel wants to win back Apple's orders in a simple way. As long as Intel develops products with indicators far beyond the M series of chips, Apple is naturally willing to obediently pay money. After all, Apple will develop its own chips, and the important reason is that the iteration speed and upgrade range of Intel chips have not reached Apple's expectations.
Of course, Intel understands this, too. After Apple's orders were reduced, Intel has been improving its own capabilities.
According to foreign media confirmation, Jeff Wilcox, director of Apple's Mac series architecture, has been poached by Intel and will be responsible for Intel's SoC architecture design work in the future.
Jeff Wilcox has been with Apple for eight years. Responsible for the development of Apple's T2 security chip and M1 series processors, it is the biggest contributor to Apple's transition from Intel chips to Apple's self-developed chips. For Apple, losing Jeff Wilcox is a big loss.
Standing on Intel's exit, it can be found that getting Jeff Wilcox is not only a strength increase, but also a successful revenge for the other way. Jeff Wilcox first worked at Intel, and before being poached by Apple, Jeff Wilcox worked at Intel as a PC chipset leader architect for three years. This trip to Intel is not so much about job hopping as going home.
Jeff Wilcox job-hopping incident can be seen as a microcosm of the recent game between Apple and Intel in the processor track. Jeff Wilcox is not the first industry big cow to leave Apple, after the release of the M series processor, many backbones of Apple's research and development team have been poached by friends.
In response, Apple had to allocate shares to engineers, amounting to as much as $50,000 to $180,000, to prevent talent from defecting to other companies.
The situation of Intel is just the opposite of Apple, Intel's new CEO Kissinger took office, invested huge sums of money in chip projects, boldly enabled technical talents, and the culture of enterprise engineers became stronger.
At the same time, Intel, in line with the idea of "no uncut corners, only a hoe that cannot be wielded", has successively recruited a number of experts from giant companies such as AMD, Nvidia and Apple.
Although in terms of product performance, Apple's processors have brought far more surprises than Intel products in the past two years, but in terms of development curve, the author is still more optimistic about Intel.
All indications are that Intel is ready to give it a go. In terms of attitude, Intel's current emphasis on chip projects is unprecedented. In terms of technology, the R&D lineup composed of multiple experts is also rare in the world.
Not only that, Intel CEO also made a careful development plan for the chip project. For Intel, it must regain its technological dominance in the chip market in the next few years, otherwise Intel will fall short.
In your opinion, can Intel return to the top under the leadership of Jeff Wilcox and other industry bigwigs?