Apple Inc has poached a top engineer from ARM Holdings, as company seeks to put the custom processors inside the Macs in coming years.
The news first spotted by Bloomberg, that Apple has hired Mike Filippo, who was the lead architect at ARM Holdings, on a number of ARM CPU designs, which includes the Cortex-A76, that was recently featured inside Qualcomm (QCOM)’s top of the line Snapdragon 855 chip.
It’s been speculated by the Bloomberg that the Mike Filippo could be filling a key spot at Apple Inc, that was place left empty after the Gerard Williams III, who was the head architect for Apple’s processors, but unfortunately he departed the company earlier this year. On this matter company hasn’t commented on hire of Filippo, that what he will be doing, but it was confirmed by ARM to Bloomberg that he left.
If have a look at the LinkedIn account for Mike Filippo, lists him as working at Apple Inc as an “architect” since May. Previously he held at the similar roles at Intel and AMD. Although, ARM and Apple aren’t entirely in any direct competition.
Apple Inc also doesn’t explicitly use the ARM’s processor designs like other companies, Qualcomm do, but it does depends on the ARM’s instruction set, when designing the processors of its own. By bringing the person who’s deeply familiar of the technology with creating chip designs on ARM’s tech, is a more natural way, for Apple Inc to further what its own chips can do.
