Microsoft Hires Key Apple Engineer To Work on Custom Chips

Microsoft lured away a veteran semiconductor designer from Apple as it looks to expand its own server-chips efforts, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From a report: 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 and Intel. The move suggests that Microsoft is accelerating a push to create homegrown chips for its servers, which power Azure cloud-computing services. The focus on custom chips follows similar efforts by Alphabet's Google and Amazon, Microsoft's biggest cloud rivals.

I really don't like the idea

[rsilvergun]

of Microsoft and Apple, who make the only viable desktop operating (sorry, I love Linux as a hobby OS and as a Server OS, but it's tough using it as a daily driver for a lot of reasons I won't get into here) making their own chips with the eventual goal of creating walled gardens.

Hopefully the industry sees this coming and steers clear of writing software for the Microsoft equivalent, just like when they tried to take over PC gaming and wall that garden off. I'm not expecting our governments to step up

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

In Intel didn't sit on their butts and fail to deliver power efficient chips to the industry Apple and other companies wouldn't have bothered to go ARM. If Intel could produce SOC that sips power instead of beer bong power, I really doubt MS or Apple would bother creating their own SOC. If you want to blame some one, blame Intel. Their latest move shows they haven't changed one bit. "lets remove the power limit to win benchmarks and get into home AC business." Then there's the spec execution bug which Intel

Re:

[Deal In One]

It's also possible that having a chip team in house will give MS more weight when it comes to negotiating with Intel on CPUs, upcoming GPUs and other accessories / services.

MS :If you are cost me too much for your gear / too slow in your development / don't make this particular CPU instruction or functionality available in the CPU, we will make our own, and all the millions of CPUs we use for Azure, etc will eventually migrate to them. Not only that, we can do an Apple and migrate to our CPUs for all our OS

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with all your points. Including the Linux one - I do enough SysAdmin work at work - I don't need to do it at home as well.

The industry is 'consolidated' the way it is was due to the common platform. A couple of us grey-beards remember the pre-PC days of the consumer market. Yes the machines were considered 'toys' in comparison, but the format hassles between Apple, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, etc. ended up causing the industry to self-limit at a particular point.

A similar headaches occured on the co

Re:

[EvilSS]

of Microsoft and Apple, who make the only viable desktop operating (sorry, I love Linux as a hobby OS and as a Server OS, but it's tough using it as a daily driver for a lot of reasons I won't get into here) making their own chips with the eventual goal of creating walled gardens.

Not sure why Apple is in that list since their desktop OS is already in a walled garden, and has been for the majority of their existence.

Re:

[PCM2]

Microsoft wants to make chips to power its Azure servers. It'll be hard to create a walled garden when customers are expected to bring their own software. And if, for example, Microsoft tries to place restrictions on how Oracle Database runs in its cloud, it'll just push customers to Oracle's cloud.

Re:

[dfghjk]

Perhaps you missed this part:

"The move suggests that Microsoft is accelerating a push to create homegrown chips for its servers, which power Azure cloud-computing services. " ...and then added this bullshit of your own:

"...making their own chips with the eventual goal of creating walled gardens."

The "eventual goal" is to have custom processors for cloud servers, not desktop OSes.

"Hopefully the industry sees this coming and steers clear of writing software for the Microsoft equivalent..."

Azure doesn't depend

steam is to big to be locked out in app store

[Joe_Dragon]

steam is to big to be locked out in app store that they can make an big antitrust push

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe Dragon make post that make not sense always

What does Valve do which puts them at risk?

[martynhare]

They do not ask for exclusivity, they allow non-Steam games to use their ancillary services and they now allow third party stores like UPlay to promote themselves through their own platform. Even their VR APIs are open to all hardware providers. That is surely the opposite of anti-competitive?

Re:

[exomondo]

VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY bad imagine ms saying you need our chip to run windows and games and guess what the flippin cost will be

I'm sure they will, just like Apple is doing with their chips. But what alternative is there? Nobody in the free software community has really made any serious headway in selling systems to the point that they could make their own custom chips and when you look at the performance and power consumption you get with Apple's chips it's totally understandable that Microsoft sees the need to compete there. You didn't think they would really target investing billions of dollars creating a free and open source SoC

Re:

[tlhIngan]

The writing's been on the wall for vertical integration of hardware and software for a long time with x86 being tapped out and custom built-in hardware for accelerating specific tasks. Not to mention the efficiency you get from targeting a specific set of hardware configurations rather than trying to build something that runs stable and efficiently on the millions and millions of possible options out there, the latter is never going to be as efficient as the former can be.

It's always been done since the daw

Re:

[exomondo]

Yes that's my point, vertical integration was traded for flexibility when we were seeing Moore's law in full effect. Now things are moving back toward vertical integration in the absence of a flexible PC architecture focussed on efficiency. Desktops & laptops with powerful, efficient CPUs & GPUs with a unified memory architecture are coming from Apple, Microsoft is certainly going to get on that train and it's not like there are vendors providing this to them so they are likely to go off on their ow

Re:

[vbdasc]

It's always been done since the dawn of computing of vertically integrated hardware and software. The first computers were vertically integrated

Only because things like compatible hardware are a relatively new invention. Before IBM System/360 few computers had any hardware compatibility with their predecessors or siblings, which wasn't much of a problem because software was primitive, OSes were the cutting edge of technology and barely existent, and most applications ran on bare hardware and were written for every machine specifically, and there was no great need to protect investments in software. But the System/360 introduced hardware compatibili

Re:

[dfghjk]

"The writing's been on the wall for vertical integration of hardware and software for a long time..."

You've been reading the wrong walls, you really need to breathe some fresher air. Vertical integration of hardware and software has been the exclusive domain of a single company for decades now. The exact opposite has been true, most likely for your entire lifetime.

"...with x86 being tapped out..."

x86 isn't tapped out. Also, /. is not full of expert opinions. Imagine that.

"...and custom built-in hardware

Re:

[exomondo]

You've been reading the wrong walls, you really need to breathe some fresher air. Vertical integration of hardware and software has been the exclusive domain of a single company for decades now. The exact opposite has been true, most likely for your entire lifetime.

You're obviously younger than I am and don't remember the early days of vertical integration of PCs before the IBM PC clones. But you also need to take your head out of the sand and start seeing that all these vendors that used to rely solely on 3rd parties for generic chips are now turning to building their own in-house (or custom chips out of collaborations) processors, not just Apple but Google and Microsoft too. Apple's own "Apple Silicon", Google's "Whitechapel", Microsoft's "SQ1" & "SQ2" and now t

AMD should start their own distro

[future assassin]

and get it polished to work on AMD hardware.

Next step...

[LordHighExecutioner]

big companies will hire Mafia people, to make offers that can't be refused to engineers willing to quit.