Apple has reportedly agreed to purchase microprocessor design company P.A. Semi, a company known for its design of sophisticated, low-power chips, which will be used in future iPhones and maybe iPod products.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not comment on our purposes and plans,” according to Steve Dowling. Dowling didn’t on the exact price paid — but the buy is supposedly costing Apple $278 million dollars in cash. Steve Jobs and Senior VP Tony Fadell reportedly led the tiny group of executives who spearheaded the acquisition, which included negotiations that took place in Jobs’ home.
P.A. Semi is a 150-person chip company, based in Santa Clara, Calif., that was founded in 2003 by Dan Dobberpuhl, a former chip designer for Digital Equipment Company. P.A. Semi’s engineering team includes employees who have worked on elite processors like Itanium, UltraSPARC and Opteron.
The new and power-efficient Power Architecture chip is called PWRficient. It is based on the PA6T processor core — the first to be designed from scratch outside the AIM alliance in a decade.
Apple’s purchase could be very bad news for Intel sales. Intel had been asking Apple to exclusively use Intel’s chips — particularly Intel’s new low-power chip, called the Atom.
Apple had been a big user of Power Architecture chips before switching from PowerPC to Intel chips in its computers a few years ago. There had been rumors that Apple would have been the first user of PWRficient processors before the move to Intel.