Apple’s Silicon Designer Jeff Wilcox Joins Intel

Apple has lost another senior executive, despite a recent push to retain its most talented engineers and executives.

Jeff Wilcox, Apple’s director of Mac system architecture who oversaw much of the Apple Silicon transition, has left Apple to rejoin Intel, ArsTechnica has reported. He will head up Intel’s efforts to develop its own system-on-a-chip.

It should be remembered that Apple has suffered a number of big name resignations in recent months. Last September for example, Doug Field, who was vice president of special projects at Apple and in charge of its car project (Project Titan), left Apple and joined Ford.

Silicon designer

Then in late November another senior executive left Apple, namely Dr Michael Schwekutsch, a former Tesla engineer with experience in powertrains, left Apple to join electric air taxi startup Archer as senior vice president of engineering.

Dr Schwekutsch held more than 100 patents related to vehicle design, and had previously worked on prototypes for the Tesla Plaid systems.

He also reportedly led production of electric drive systems for several vehicle models from Tesla, Porsche, BMW and others, according to his online resume.

Now Jeff Wilcox has announced that after eight years working at Apple, overseeing its laptop and desktop development, he is to join Intel.

Incidentally, Wilcox had left Intel to join Apple in 2013, so the move is something of a homecoming for him.

“After an amazing eight years I have decided to leave Apple and pursue another opportunity,” he posted on LinkedIn. “It has been an incredible ride and I could not be prouder of all we accomplished during my time there, culminating in the Apple SIlicon transition with the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max SOCs and systems.”

He said he would dearly miss all of my Apple colleagues and friends.

Last week he announced that he had started his new role as Intel Fellow, Design Engineering Group CTO, Client SoC Architecture.

“I could not be more thrilled to be back working with the amazing teams there to help create groundbreaking SOCs. Great things are ahead!” he posted.

Staff retention

Apple has been keen to retain its key staff of late.

It recently came to light that Apple was paying selected engineers a huge bonus in order to retain their services and stop their defection to Meta Platforms (Facebook) and other firms.

Apple issued significant stock bonuses to a selected number of engineers, ranging from between $50,000 to as much as $180,000.

The lucky engineers were reportedly based in silicon design, hardware, and select software and operations groups.

Earlier this week it was revealed that the 2021 pay of Apple chief executive Tim Cook was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, at nearly $100 million (£74m).