Microsoft Poaches Key Apple Engineer to Work on Server Chips
Microsoft has poached a prominent chip architect from Apple in a sign of its rising chip-making ambitions.
The chip architect, Mike Filippo, has departed Apple and joined Microsoft as part of the company’s effort to design in-house chips for the data centers running its cloud, according to a report by Bloomberg. The report said the ex-Apple employee is working on central processing units (CPUs) for Microsoft. The move signals the software giant is moving ahead with plans to build homegrown chips for servers that power its Azure cloud.
The focus on custom chips follows similar efforts by Alphabet's Google and Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's top rivals in the cloud-computing market. They are taking pages out of Apple's playbook, replacing the standard server chips designed by Intel in favor of homegrown chips that are designed the way they want them to be.
Why spend several years and tens of millions of dollars designing a chip at all? AWS, Google, and Microsoft each are estimated to operate millions of servers spread out around the world in colossal data centers that they use internally and rent out to millions of outside firms over the cloud. Even small bumps in performance or improvements in the cost of powering and cooling the chips add up in the context of their vast operations.
Amazon has designed a wide range of chips for its AWS cloud-computing unit, including a line of Arm-based CPUs called Graviton. AWS has aggressively marketed the price-to-performance ratio of its Graviton chip that, it says, also uses less power than Intel's server CPUs for data centers. Last year, Google said that it had hired a top executive at Intel's design engineering group, Uri Frank, to head up its new and growing server chip unit.
The shift threatens to undercut Intel and AMD, which supply the chips for Microsoft's Azure cloud service.
When Apple poached Filippo in 2019, the move was widely seen as a boon for the company’s efforts to wring more performance out of its A-series systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) for the iPhone and roll out M1 chip for Macs.
Apple was one of the early movers in the technology industry into in-house chips, and it has transformed into a powerhouse in the chip sector. The consumer electronics giant is in the process of moving away from Intel chips in favor of its in-house "Apple Silicon" chips, including the game-changing M1 that sits in its mid-range laptops and tablets. Last year, it upped the ante with the M1 "Pro" and M1 "Max" chips for the MacBook Pro.
Filippo has worked for Apple for roughly three years after spending a decade as a lead CPU architect and lead system architect at Arm, which sells the blueprints at the heart of Apple's in-house chips for its iPhones, Macs, iPads, and other consumer electronics. Prior to Arm, he served as a chip designer at both Intel and AMD earlier in his career. He is currently working as chief compute architect at Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The departure is a blow to Apple, which recently lost another prominent chip designer, Jeff Wilcox, to Intel.
