Apple chip architect leaves for Microsoft

Microsoft has hired a processor designer who previously worked on chips at Apple. The chip architect is reportedly going to work on processors for data centers. Earlier in January, an important chip designer left Apple for Intel.

Mike Filippo worked at Apple as a chip architect from May 2019 to the beginning of this year, but has made the switch to Microsoft to become Chief Compute Architect there, according to his LinkedIn page.

Filippo has worked as a chip architect at AMD and Intel in the past and worked at Arm for ten years before joining Apple. There he was, among other things, the lead architect of the Neoverse V1, Cortex-X1 and Cortex A-78.

According to Bloomberg, the chip architect at Microsoft will start working at the Azure division to design processors for data center applications. Like Amazon and Google, Microsoft designs its own chips for servers in order to optimize the processors for its own data center applications.

It is the second departure of a leading chip designer from Apple in a short time. Earlier in January, it was revealed that Jeff Wilcox was leaving for Intel. He led Apple’s Mac System Architecture division and was responsible for the development of the M1 socs.