Apple has finally found substantial use or the $18 billion it has been storing in the bank for a long time now. Though the past has been witnessing to many a rumor of acquisitions by Apple, no one expected Apple to go ahead with its latest acquisition - P.A.Semi. A designer of PowerPC chips; veterans of popular chip design projects founded P.A.Semi in 2003. This includes people from DEC’s Alpha and StrongARM processor groups. Apple acquired the company to move away from Intel, whom so far produced the chips for the iPod and iPhone. The company of late had designed the impressive PA6T-1682M chip widely known in the chip world for its amazing features including two sixty four bit PowerPC processors, two memory controllers and a host of system on a chip features, including PCI-E controllers and Ethernet controllers. The 2GHz version of this chip uses up only five to a dozen watts.  When the chip first hit the spotlight, all eyes were on Apple wondering whether they would let their laptops escape the G4 era. The speculations were dissolved when Apple quoting performance per watt, sided with Intel again. 

Taking over, PA Semi for a bargain of $278 million, a figure that hardly makes a scratch on the bonnet of its humungous profits, the retention of the staff seems to indicate Apple’s efforts to focus on single processor architecture. However, it is also possible that Apple was well into product development with P.A. Semi tried to avoid repeating history ( as happened with Motorola and IBM (where the main processor supplier was designing its parts with non-Apple markets in mind). Why Apple did this, is anyone’s guess.