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? At first glance, 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 1990s. The most interesting thing about this purchase is the nature of P.A.'s one major product. The PowerPC chip called PWRFicient. Yes, the same architecture that Apple dumped in 2005 in favor of Intel's x86 architectu
