Microsoft hires away another key silicon engineer from Apple

Apple Park photo of the side of the main building
Apple Park photo of the side of the main building (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

  • Microsoft has hired Mike Filippo to work in the company's Azure group.
  • Filippo is a veteran semiconductor designer who worked at Apple as a chip architect.

Another key Apple engineer has been drawn away from the company.

As reported by Bloomberg, Microsoft has hired away Mike Filippo, a veteran semiconductor designer who worked at Apple for the last two years as a chip architect. According to the report, Filippo's work at Microsoft will involve custom silicon within the Azure group.

Mike 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.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. Filippo is credited with advancing the capabilities of Arm's underlying technologies in phones and other devices.

Filippo's exit from Apple is the latest in a number of high-profile executives and engineers leaving the company. Just last week, the company lost another engineer to Intel.

(Intel) has hired Jeff Wilcox as an Intel Fellow and CTO of the Design Engineering Group. Wilcox, who was previously Director of Mac Systems Architecture at Apple, helped lead the Mac's transition to Apple silicon that now powers the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac.

Executives and engineers are always popping between companies but it seems that it is just accelerating a lot more lately.

Joe Wituschek
Contributor

Joe Wituschek is a Contributor at iMore. With over ten years in the technology industry, one of them being at Apple, Joe now covers the company for the website. In addition to covering breaking news, Joe also writes editorials and reviews for a range of products. He fell in love with Apple products when he got an iPod nano for Christmas almost twenty years ago. Despite being considered a "heavy" user, he has always preferred the consumer-focused products like the MacBook Air, iPad mini, and iPhone 13 mini. He will fight to the death to keep a mini iPhone in the lineup. In his free time, Joe enjoys video games, movies, photography, running, and basically everything outdoors.