The announcement that Apple bought P.A. Semi today for $278 million brings up a lot of questions. What is this company about and why would Apple buy them? It seems very strange.
P.A. has one major product and about 150 really smart engineers. They have lots of venture capital including money from Texas Instruments. They also have a genius of a CEO in Dan Dobberpuhl, who has a long history in designing revolutionary chips - including DEC Alpha and the ARM architecture while he was at DEC in the 1980s and 90s.
The most interesting thing about this purchase is that P.A. has one major product. A PowerPC chip called PWRFicient. Yes, the same architecture that Apple dumped in 2005 in favor of Intel's x86 architecture.
As the name implies, the chips are extremely efficient low power versions of the PowerPCnothing that would find its way
