Ex-Intel guy: Intel Skylake QA is reason why Apple started ARM project

Former Intel principal engineer François Piednoël claims the poor quality assurance of Intel's Skylake processor series was the reason why Apple decided to start making in-house, ARM-based processors for its Mac computers. Over the next two years, Apple will transition its entire Mac lineup away from Intel's x86 towards an in-house ARM-based platform.

Piednoël, who doesn't shy away from giving his opinion about a variety of topics on social media, claims Apple may still be onboard the Intel chip train if the company hadn't found so many problems within the Skylake architecture:

"The quality assurance of Skylake was more than a problem," says Piednoël during a casual Xplane chat and stream session. "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."