Intel lured away one of the engineering leaders overseeing Apple's effort to move to its own Mac processors.
The semiconductor giant has hired Jeff Wilcox to be the chief technology officer in its design engineering group for client systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). Wilcox said in a Linkedin post that he started at Intel in January.
Wilcox was previously Apple's head of Mac system architecture, helping to manage its transition to custom chips in its personal computers.
In 2020, Apple announced it was moving away from Intel’s products in favor of its internally designed "Apple Silicon" chips, which are modeled on the A-series SoCs that have been at the heart of its flagship iPhones for the last decade. Apple has said that it plans to phase the high-end in-house processors into its desktop and laptop lineup within two years. Apple used Intel's Core processors in its Macs for over a decade and a half.
Apple’s decision led to the launch of its M1 chip in 2020 that sits inside its mid-range Mac laptops and iPad.
The M1 has shaken up the semiconductor industry with its mix of high-performance and power efficiency. These attributes stem from the tight integration between Apple's chips, system hardware, operating system, and software. Apple is upping its challenge to Intel in the personal computer market with the M1 Pro and M1 Max in its MacBook Pros, which have what the company calls unparalleled performance for high-end laptops.
Unless its engineering team hits delays, 2022 is the year Apple plans to completely push Intel out of its Mac lineup, even ousting it from the top-of-the-line Mac Pro desktop, which now runs on a server-class Intel Xeon.
Wilcox worked at Apple for roughly eight years in various different engineering roles. He joined the consumer electronics giant in 2013 from Intel, where for three years he was lead architect for desktop and laptop chips.
Intel is striking back against Apple with its next generation of PC chips, code-named Alder Lake, which use a combination of high-performance and energy-efficient cores in a way that promises to improve performance.