Apple Buys PA Semi

Big fish, little fish... this is the same old story, repeating itself over and over again everywhere around us. Sometimes, the little fish managed to evade, but in the end, it's all about the law of the jungle, maybe a little more "human" than you think when you hear about this. Oh, what's the story? Well, Apple just took over PA Semi, a US-based chipmaker!


The Santa Clara-based company has about 150 employees, and specializes in high performance, low energy chips. Considering this, it's no secret the purpose of this action - Apple's iPods will take full advantage of PA Semi's chip, and we may even see iPhones using it in the future.

The deal is worth $278 million, and Apple didn't say what they have in mind with the company, but it's worth mentioning that, as we speak, PA Semi's official site is down, displaying the following message: "www.pasemi.com Temporarily Unavailable This account has surpassed its bandwidth allocation at the present time. You may reach the account administrator at www@www.pasemi.com"

Well, Apple may have dropped the PowerPC processors for Intel Core Duo, but they will probably get back to them, at least for the mobile devices, since PA Semi's chip is based on the same architecture Apple deserted a few years ago...