What you need to know

  • Apple has hired chip designer Mike Filippo away from ARM.
  • He was the Lead CPU Architect and Lead System Architect at ARM for 10 years.
  • This continues Apple's push to incorperate ARM chips into the MacBook.

Apple has hired ARM chip design, Mike Filippo, to join its chip architecture team away from ARM as the company continues to set the stage for a jump from Intel to ARM processor.

Filippo joined Apple back in May according to his LinkedIn profile. He has previously worked at ARM as Lead CPU Architect and Lead System Architect for ten years. He will join Apple's chip team based in Texas. ARM confirmed Filippo's departure in a statement to Bloomberg.

Mike was a long-time valuable member of the ARM community. We appreciate all of his efforts and wish him well in his next endeavor.

Apple has not not kept it secret that it plans on migrating its MacBook line from Intel processors over to ARM chips. It also comes on the heals of it abandoning Intel's modems for Qualcomm's after it could not keep pace with the advent of 5G. To do so, it needs to manufacture is own in-house ARM chips, which it has been busy doing over the past few years.

It's unclear when exactly Apple plans to start introducing ARM chips into the Mac, but it could comes as soon as 2020.