Apple's Director of Mac System Architecture Jeff Wilcox has announced that he has left the Cupertino-based company to work for Intel. Wilcox has taken the role of CTO of the Client SoC Architecture team in the Design Engineering Group at Intel, per his LinkedIn. During his time at Apple, Wilcox played an important role in the transition to Apple's own M1 chips from Intel.

"I'm pleased to share that I have started a new position as Intel Fellow, Design Engineering Group CTO, Client SoC Architecture at Intel Corporation. I could not be more thrilled to be back working with the amazing teams there to help create groundbreaking SOCs. Great things are ahead!"

Prior to working on the Apple M1 chip, Wilcox was a part of a team at Apple that was focused on developing the T-series chips. His profile says that he "led the transition" for all Macs to Apple silicon.

Director of the Mac System Architecture team that included all system architecture, signal integrity, and power integrity for Mac systems. Led the transition for all Macs to Apple Silicon, beginning with the M1 chip, and developed the SoC and system architecture behind the T2 coprocessor before that.

Have the chipset wars begun, again?

It seems that chipset wars have begun again. With Apple M1, the Cupertino giant has changed the dynamics of the whole industry. The company's first-gen M1 chips delivered performance and efficiency at low power usage. Intel has followed up Apple's, or rather ARM's, design of segregating chip's cores into Power and Efficiency cores with 12th Gen Core chips.

Even though the 12th Gen chipsets are yet to release, Intel is claiming that its new chipsets can deliver better performance than M1 Max and AMD's Ryzen chips. With Wilcox joining the other side, the chipset war is going to get intense again, it seems.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has said that he "hopes" to win back Apple's business by making a chip that is better than Apple's chip. In addition, he has also said that 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 fight hard to win Tim's business in this area," he added.

Wilcox brings a lot of experience and learnings to Intel

Wilcox brings a lot of experience to Intel. He was previously at Intel before he joined Apple. He worked as a principal engineer on PC chipsets at Intel. Moreover, he has also worked at chipset companies like Magnum Semiconductor and Nvidia. Upon joining Intel from Apple, Wilcox said:

After an amazing eight years I have decided to leave Apple and pursue another opportunity. It has been an incredible ride and I could not be prouder of all we accomplished during my time there, culminating in the Apple Silicon transition with the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max SOCs and systems. I will dearly miss all of my Apple colleagues and friends, but I am looking forward to the next journey which will start at the first of the year.

Via: MacRumors