Apple hires CPU architect who designed ARM Cortex-A76 cores

Chip designer Mike Filippo is employed by Apple as a CPU architect. This is evident from his profile page on LinkedIn. Filippo has worked at ARM in recent years, including on the Cortex-A76 design. Before that, Filippo worked as an architect at Intel and AMD.

Filippo has been with Apple since May, Bloomberg noted. Apple itself has not disclosed anything about hiring the chip designer. Filippo was the lead architect in the development of ARM’s Cortex-A76 design. The Snapdragon 855, among others, is based on those cores. Filippo spent ten years with the British processor designer ARM and before that he spent years at Intel and AMD in similar positions.

In late March, Cnet said CPU designer Gerard Williams III would have resigned from Apple. His LinkedIn page still states that he works at Apple, but he is said to have been inactive since February. Williams was the chief designer of numerous Apple stocks, from the A7 to the A12X. Filippo may be his replacement.

It is rumored that Apple plans to eventually replace the Intel processors in its iMacs and MacBooks with proprietary ARM processors. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who specializes in Apple, claims that this will become a reality from 2020 or 2021.

Apple has been using its own chips in its smartphones and tablets since 2010 and has recruited various top people for this over the years. They often leave after a few years to take on a new challenge. For example, Jim Keller worked on the A4 and A5 socs, after which he made the Zen architecture at AMD and later switched to Intel. In 2017, chip designer Manu Gulatia made the switch from Apple to Google. He would have been crucial at Apple in the team that develops its own socs for the iPhones and iPads.