Following our recent report on the exit of a member of Apple’s M1 team – Jeff Wilcox – to Intel, it has emerged that another influential chip engineer at the Cupertino firm has also departed.
Bloomberg cited “people with knowledge of the matter” in its report that Microsoft had hired veteran semiconductor designer Mike Filippo, as the Redmond company seeks to expand its own efforts to develop server chips.
The article added that Filippo, who joined Apple in 2019 after spending a decade at Arm, will work on processors within Microsoft’s Azure group helmed by Rani Borkar.
While Microsoft’s long-time processor partners Intel and AMD currently provide chips for Azure servers, the luring of Filippo indicates that the company is accelerating a drive to develop homegrown chips for its servers, which power Azure’s cloud-computing services. This would mirror similar recent moves by Microsoft’s primary cloud competitors, Alphabet and Amazon.
During Filippo’s time at Arm, he was credited with advancing the capabilities of the company’s underlying technologies for phones and other devices.