At this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple announced the third major CPU transition for the Mac as it decided to move away from using Intel chips to custom-designed Apple Silicon processors. Switching to custom CPUs that are designed in-house gives Apple more control over its lineup of Macs, but why the decision came now? According to former Intel principal engineer François Piednoël, Intel’s line of Skylake processors is to blame for Apple’s decision to part ways with the chipmaker. In a recent video posted to YouTube, Piednoël says that the quality assurance for Intel’s Skylake processors was “more than a problem, it was abnormally bad.” As per Piednoël’s account, while Apple was contemplating to make its own chips, it wasn’t until after the Cupertino-based company faced issues with Intel’s Skylake processors that it began to make serious plans for its own CPUs. “When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you’re not leading into the right place,” says Piednoël adding, “Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture.” Also read | Interesting facts about Johny Srouji, the man behind Apple’s custom processors Piednoël says that it was the bad quality assurance of Skylake that forced Apple to actually go away from Intel’s platform. If that was not the case, Apple would have carried on with no problems. Express Tech is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@expresstechnology) and stay updated with the latest tech news Piednoël blames the shakeup in leadership as well as the general mismanagement that led to critical engineers leaving the team and poor planning that resulted in poor quality assurance of Skylake. He shared the story to let the Intel shareholders know what actually happened. He believes that Intel is still a great company and that it can learn and avoid future mistakes.
