Microsoft has lured away veteran semiconductor designer Mike Filippo from Apple as it looks to expand its own server-chips efforts, Bloomberg News reports, citing “people with knowledge of the matter.”
Mark Gurman, Dina Bass, and Ian King report for Bloomberg News:
Filippo will work on processors within Microsoft’s Azure group, run by Rani Borkar, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the move hasn’t been announced. A Microsoft spokesman confirmed the hire of Filippo, who also has worked at Arm Ltd. and Intel Corp.
The move suggests that Microsoft is accelerating a push to create homegrown chips for its servers, which power Azure cloud-computing services. The focus on custom chips follows similar efforts by Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft’s biggest cloud rivals.
The shift threatens to undercut Microsoft’s longtime processor partners, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which currently supply chips for Azure servers. Intel fell as much as 2% on the news Wednesday, while AMD dropped 1.1%.
For Apple, Filippo’s exit marks another loss of a high-profile engineer. He joined Apple in 2019 as a chip architect after serving as a top designer of semiconductors at Arm for a decade. He was at Intel for about five years before that.
MacDailyNews Take: Full headline: Microsoft hires key Apple engineer to design server chips because Intel sucks.
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