Apple Silicon lead jumps ship to join Intel

Over the last few years, Apple has made some waves after moving away from Intel processors and producing its own high-power chips based on ARM. Now, the industry is seeing another shakeup, with Apple's Silicon lead now departing the company to join … you guessed it, Intel.

Apple Silicon lead, Jeff Wilcox, has now left Apple to team up with Intel once again and oversee architecture for all Intel SoC designs. Writing on his Linkedin profile, Wilcox confirmed the change, saying: “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.”

At Intel, Wilcox will now act as “Intel Fellow, Design Engineering Group CTO, Client SoC Architecture at Intel Corporation”, working on brand new SoCs for future generations.

This move comes at the very end of Apple's transition period away from Intel CPUs. From this point on, all new Macs will utilise Apple Silicon processors and all apps on the app store have transitioned over to supporting the new processors as well.

According to Apple Insider, Apple has recently been offering massive $180,000 bonuses to its key engineers to keep them from leaving. Apple will need to keep its Silicon team intact as it continues to develop the M2 and future processors for next-gen Macs and iPad Pros.

KitGuru Says: Apple hasn't announced a replacement lead for its Silicon team yet, but we should hear more on that in a few months time as the company gears up to unveil its next-gen processors. Those reveals should take place in June, during the annual WWDC conference. 

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