Microsoft poaches top chip architect from Apple: Here's why

While we have been reading news about Meta poaching employees from Microsoft and Apple. Now, news has emerged that Microsoft has poached a prominent chip architect from Apple to help with its chip-making ambitions.

Microsoft has been reportedly been working on designing in-house chips for its data centres. To further its ambitions, according to a new Bloomberg report, Mike Filippo has left Apple and joined Microsoft. The report further claims that Filippo is now working on central processing units (CPUs) for Microsoft.

This move suggests that Microsoft is finally moving forward with its plans to build homegrown chips for servers that power its Azure cloud service. This focus on developing custom chips for servers follows ongoing efforts being made by Alphabet's Google and Amazon's AWS, both of which are the top rivals in the cloud computing services market.

If this report is true, then Microsoft is looking to replace standard server chips designed by Intel in favour of custom chips that perform the way they want.

Why develop custom chips for servers?

Amazon, Google and Microsoft own and operate millions of servers spread out around the world. These servers are data centres that are being used by the companies internally and by their clients too. This is why even a small bump in performance or improvement in cost turns into a lot of money saved.

Amazon already has a good lineup of chips for its AWS unit, including the cost-effective Arm-based Graviton CPU lineup. The price-to-performance ratio of the Graviton chip is massive and uses less power than Intel's server CPUs.

Last year, Google had also hired a top executive at Intel's design engineering group, Uri Frank, who is heading the company's new and growing server chip unit.

Microsoft also looking to shift to custom chips, this is threatening to Intel and AMD, which supply the chips for the Azure cloud-computing service.

Filippo was poached by Apple back in 2019 from Arm, where he worked a decade as lead CPU architect and lead system architect. Prior to Arm, he had worked as a chip designer at both Intel and AMD. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is currently working as chief compute architect at Microsoft.

This is another major blow to Apple in a small-time, considering that it recently lost chip designer, Jeff Wilcox, to Intel. Wilcox helped the company design the custom Mac chips released recently.