Reports from the Heart of the Machine
Editors: Du Wei, Zenan
After leaving Apple, Jeff Wilcox became intel fellow and CTO of the Design Engineering business group.
After Apple's M1 chip achieved an energy consumption ratio that surpassed Intel's Core, Intel poached the chief designer back.
In November 2020, Apple released the first chip M1 specially built for macs; in October last year, Apple launched M1 Pro and M1 Max in succession, introducing the system-on-chip (SoC) architecture into the Pro system for the first time, achieving new breakthroughs in memory bandwidth, power efficiency, capacity and so on.
Jeff Wilcox, head of the Mac System Architecture team, was instrumental in this series.
Image source: appleinsider
He is solely responsible for all architectural design, signal integrity, and power integrity of Mac systems at Apple. Starting with the M1 chip, he led the Mac team to the transition to Apple's self-developed chip and developed the SoC and system architecture of the T2 coprocessor.
Two weeks ago, however, Jeff Wilcox announced on LinkedIn that he would be leaving Apple in search of new opportunities. "After an incredible eight years at Apple, I decided to leave," he said.
Just a day ago, Jeff Wilcox finally announced his new owner.
According to him on LinkedIn, he has already worked at Intel as an Intel Fellow, CTO of the Design Engineering Group, and responsible for client SoC architecture design. He said, "I am very excited to be working with Intel's amazing team again to create a breakthrough SoC together. Great things lie ahead."
Jeff Wilcox already works at Intel earlier this month.
In the past year or two, Apple has released an exceptionally efficient M1 series of chips, and Intel does not want to be left behind. At present, Intel is developing new chips and hopes to be able to match Apple. Intel's poaching of Wilcox is a crucial move.
It's unclear if Apple has a replacement for Wilcox.
About Jeff Wilcox
Jeff Wilcox has more than 25 years of experience in the chip industry, graduated from the University of Rochester in 1995 and worked for NVIDIA, Intel, Apple and video compression technology company Magnum.
Image source: LinkedIn
He worked at Apple for eight years, and the M1 chip introduced by Apple in recent years has made waves in the computer industry with its high performance and efficiency. When we talk about Arm processors from other companies today, we usually assume that they can't meet the capabilities of Apple products. Qualcomm is believed to have acquired Nuvia to compete with Apple.
From October 2010 to November 2013, Wilcox served as a Principal Engineer at Intel, responsible for the power management architecture of the Atom Processor Chipset Program. After that, he joined Apple and began an eight-year Career at Apple.
As director of system architecture for Mac, Wilcox oversees Apple's transition to its own chips, including the company's M1 chip.
Two weeks ago, Wilcox announced its departure from Apple, saying that "it has been an incredible journey through Apple's self-developed systems for the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs and systems, and I'm proud of what I've achieved here."
We may expect intel to launch its own new architecture mobile processor in the near future.
Reference Links:
https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/06/apple-engineering-director-m1-intel/
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/01/06/apple-loses-lead-apple-silicon-designer-jeff-wilcox-to-intel
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/apple-loses-a-key-mac-silicon-executive-to-intel-amidst-m1-transition/