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Apple Loses Key Apple Silicon Engineer to Intel

Apple’s former Director of Mac System Architecture Jeff Wilcox has left Apple to take on a new role at Intel. Wilcox was a key part of Apple’s M1 team and had a leading role in the Mac’s transition from Intel chips to Apple Silicon.

As noted on LinkedIn (via Tom’s Hardware), Wilcox was “previously 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 M1 chip, and developed the SoC and system architecture behind the T2 coprocessor before that.”

Wilcox announced his departure from Apple back in December, at the time he said that he was pursuing a new opportunity and that he’d had “an amazing eight years” with Apple.

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.

As of this week, Wilcox is the Design Engineering Group CTO at Intel, where he is the “leader of the Client SoC Architecture team in the Design Engineering Group at Intel. Responsible for the architecture of all SoCs for all Intel client segments.” Wilcox had previously worked at Intel where he served as a principal engineer on PC chipsets. Prior to that, he worked at Magnum Semiconductor and Nvidia.

It is uncertain if Wilcox received one of the “M1” t-shirts that Apple in December gifted to engineers and staffers on the Apple Silicon project to celebrate the end of the first year of the Mac’s transition to Apple Silicon

The Apple silicon team is led by Johny Srouji, Apple’s vice president of hardware technologies, and it’s not clear what impact Wilcox’s departure will have on the development of Apple silicon chips going forward.

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.