Microsoft, Intel, Meta, etc., poached Apple's chip engineers, and the talent competition has been upgraded!
Microsoft, Intel, Meta
Recently, a large number of Apple engineers have been poached. According to foreign media reports, Apple senior engineer Mike Filippo will join Microsoft as the chief architect, responsible for the development of Azure server chips.
Not long ago, on January 6, Apple's M1 chip design director Jeff Wilcox also announced that he had left Apple and returned to Intel to be responsible for the client SoC architecture design. Jeff Wilcox is the main leader in Apple's independent design of Mac chips.
What is even more surprising is that in December 2021 earlier, Apple had only about 100 engineers to be mined by Meta. In fact, not only recently, but in recent years, Apple's chip team has been losing talents.
Apple's follow-up Mac chip development may be affected
Earlier, Apple's laptops mainly used Intel processors. A few years ago, Apple launched a plan to replace Intel's chips with self-developed chips based on the ARM architecture.
Apple realized this plan in November 2020 with the release of the M1, its first chip built specifically for Macs, followed by the M1 Pro and M1 Max in October 2021.
The successful self-developed chips have brought great benefits to Apple. First of all, the M1 chip using the ARM architecture has better performance than the Intel platform in some scenarios, and it also has advantages in terms of battery life and heat generation.
In addition, Apple Mac notebooks use self-developed chips, which can make them no longer limited by other cooperative manufacturers, and can customize the design of chips according to their own needs, and have more freedom to play.
Third, Apple's iPhone and iPad use ARM-based chips, and Macs are replaced with self-developed ARM-based chips, which can more easily open up the software ecosystem between devices and bring a better experience.
In the process of realizing the replacement of Intel chips with independent chips, Jeff Wilcox and Mike Filippo can be said to have contributed greatly.
Jeff Wilcox joined Apple in 2013, and it has been 8 years since then. Before that, he also worked for NVIDIA, Intel, and video compression technology company Magnum. In general, Jeff Wilcox has worked in the chip industry for more than 25 years and has rich experience.
Jeff Wilcox is fully responsible for all the architectural design of the Mac system at Apple. Starting from the M1 chip, he led the Mac team to realize the transition to Apple's self-developed chips, which can be said to be a major contributor to the realization of this plan.
Mike Filippo joined Apple in 2019. He has worked in the chip industry for nearly 26 years. Before joining Apple, he worked for ARM for 10 years as chief CPU architect, chief system architect and ARM Fellow.
Mike Filippo is credited with improving fundamental performance in mobile phones and other devices, he has been responsible for the development of Cortex-A76, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A57 and more.
When he first joined Apple in 2019, according to reports at the time, Mike Filippo's experience in more advanced chips such as servers helped Apple achieve its goal of replacing Intel chips in laptops with self-developed chips.
It can be seen that Apple is inseparable from the efforts of Jeff Wilcox and Mike Filippo in the realization of self-developed chips for notebook computers. However, how will the departure of the two heavyweight chip talents affect Apple's subsequent development of Mac chips?
In December 2021, it was revealed that Apple will be equipped with a new generation of M2 chips in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air launched in 2022. This chip has the same number of CPU cores as the M1 chip, up to 10 graphics cores, and features, and cost-effectiveness have improved.
At the same time, it is reported that Apple may use TSMC's 3nm technology in the A17 chip and M3 series chips in 2023. It can be seen that Apple's updated M3 chip may already be planned, and according to rumors, M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max are all It is a single-die design, and the M3 will use a 4-die design with a maximum of 40-core CPU.
It is not difficult to imagine that the departure of two heavyweight engineers will inevitably affect the progress of M2, and possibly the planned M3.
However, some netizens said that the departure of several chip engineers will not have a great impact on Apple's chips, at least within the controllable range. This netizen believes that a mature company as big as Apple will not be so dependent on a few key figures .
In addition, some netizens believe that many companies now focus on knowledge management, and even if engineers leave, knowledge will remain in the company. In short, the departure of several engineers will not affect the development of the company's follow-up products.
However, it is undeniable that the advancement of all work is inseparable from the promotion of personnel, especially in the chip industry with high technical barriers, it is inseparable from the overall control and decision-making of experienced engineers and leaders. In the short term , if Apple fails to find a suitable replacement, the next work process will inevitably be delayed.
Tech companies self-developed chips to accelerate the battle for talent
Why are Apple chip engineers poached in large numbers? From the perspective of the external environment, mainly experienced chip talents are limited, but in recent years, many technology companies have developed their own chips, increasing the competition for chip talents.
Before Microsoft, many technology companies have started their own chip research, such as Google and Amazon in foreign countries. Not long ago, Google released a new generation of Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro mobile phones, equipped with self-developed Tensor processors.
Amazon has also carried out self-research on chips for a long time. The company acquired the Israeli chip company Annapurna Labs in 2015 and released the latest general-purpose server chip Graviton 3 and machine learning cloud chip Trainium in December last year.
Why do technology companies have to develop their own chips? The point is to seek new breakthroughs while reducing reliance on chip suppliers. For example, Amazon. The company used Intel's x86 server chips before. However, in recent years, Amazon believes that ARM-based chips have lower power consumption and stronger architecture. The future is more promising, so Amazon has developed its own ARM-based server chips.
Why does Microsoft have to develop its own chips? First, it considers that the self-developed chips can be customized according to their own needs, which can bring a better experience to users. Second, the cost of Intel processors is not low. Even if some of the profits are distributed to the foundry TSMC, the cost is still lower by comparison.
For technology companies, the recruitment of chip talents is the top priority. What can be done? Like Amazon, you can use acquisitions, and the other is to hire the right talent from the industry, just like Microsoft hired Mike Filippo from Apple.
The addition of Mike Filippo is of great significance to Microsoft. As mentioned above, Mike Filippo has rich experience in AMR architecture. At the same time, Apple's M1 processor has proved that ARM architecture processor can also achieve low power consumption and high performance in notebooks, and even more Better than the X86 architecture, and Mike Filippo is involved.
So if Microsoft wants to replace Intel's X86 chips with ARM-based chips, Mike Filippo is very suitable.
In addition, a large number of Apple engineers have been dug, which may also be related to its imperfect compensation and reward system. It is understood that shortly after it was revealed that about 100 Apple engineers were dug by Meta, Apple distributed a value of 80,000 to 120,000 US dollars (about 320,000 to 115,000 US dollars) to some senior engineers in the fields of chip design, hardware, software and operations. million) stock awards.
Apple has sometimes given out additional cash bonuses to employees before, but stock awards like this one are unusual, according to industry sources. It can be speculated that this may be a temporary solution that Apple has come up with in order to keep people.
However, this also revealed that perhaps Apple itself had loopholes in the compensation and rewards of employees before, and this reward policy also brought another problem. It is said that about 10% to 20% of engineers in relevant departments received this reward. , while other engineers who were not rewarded expressed dissatisfaction that the selection process was unfair, which instead caused internal confusion.
