Microsoft Corp. has hired a veteran chip designer from Apple Inc. as part of an effort to design its own chips.

Bloomberg reported today that Mike Filippo joined Microsoft after nearly three years at Apple. According to his LinkedIn profile, Filippo previously spent 10 years at Arm Ltd. Prior to that, he worked at Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

While at Arm, Filippo was behind the development of Arm’s Cortex-A76, Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A57 chips and its future processors based on seven-nanometer and five-nanometer processes. When Filippo was hired by Apple in May 2019, the move was described as a big hire for the company at a time it was moving away from Intel X86 chips. The same could be said today for Microsoft.

Microsoft’s gradual embrace of Arm-based architecture dates back to 2017 and an announcement that it had opened up new avenues for Arm-based chip makers to provide processing power to the data center. Forward to 2020 and Microsoft’s interest in Arm-based architecture continued to grow.

The advantage of Arm-based chips is that they can be faster than x86 chips and have significantly lower power requirements. Arm-based chips can also employ advanced architecture and technologies, for example, processing inference AI two orders of magnitude faster.

The most apparent use for Arm-based chips at Microsoft is within Azure servers, but the company is also looking to move away from Intel chips in its Surface line of personal computers. Bloomberg notes that Microsoft hiring Filippo implies that it is accelerating its push to create homegrown chips.

Microsoft poaching Filippo is not the first time a key Apple chip designer has left the company. Jeff Wilcox, who led the transition of Macs to Apple silicon and worked on the M1 chip and T2 security chip, left Apple for Intel last week.

Three former Apple engineers, including the former head of Apple’s CPU architecture team Gerald Williams III, left the company in 2019 to found Nuvia Inc. Nuvia was subsequently acquired by Qualcomm Inc. for $1.4 billion in January 2021.

Image: LinkedIn