During this week’s WWDC 2020 event, Apple officially announced that it would be transitioning away from Intel processors to ARM-based CPUs for its future Mac lineup. This diversion appears to have been long in the making, but according to one of blue team’s previous employees, Intel’s loss was driven by a key mistake that prompted Apple to do business elsewhere.
In a new video (via PC Gamer), ex-Intel principal engineer François Piednoël claimed that the lack of quality assurance with Skylake is what ultimately drove Apple into ditching blue team’s processors. “The quality assurance of Skylake was more than a problem,” he said. “It was abnormally bad. We were getting way too much citing for little things inside Skylake. Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad.”
“When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you’re not leading into the right place,” Piednoël added. “For me this is the inflection point. This is where the Apple guys who were always contemplating to switch, they went and looked at it and said: ‘Well, we’ve probably got to do it.’ Basically the bad quality assurance of Skylake is responsible for them to actually go away from the platform.”