Apple’s surprising purchase of P.A. Semi, a niche chip designer, for $278 million has analysts and journalists trying to produce sense of the deal and what it means for future products.

P.A. Semi is a 150-person company specializing in high-performance, low-power processors for the PowerPC platform — the very platform Apple dumped a few years ago in favor of Intel chips for the Macintosh. P.A. Semi was founded in 2003 by Dan Dobberpuhl, a long-time Digital Equipment designer. He was a lead designer for DEC’s Alpha and StrongARM processors in the 1990s.

Apple has been talking to P.A. Semi for about three years, just before abandoning the PowerPC line, Forbes reported. At that moment, Dobberpuhl was talking about designing super-powerful chips that drew little potential, but Apple ultimately chose to move the Mac to the Intel platform, Forbes said.

P.A. Semi boasts an impressive team of designers. Besides Dobberpuhl’s work on DEC chips, its designers have worked

on Intel’s Itanium, AMD’s Opteron and Sun’s UltraSparc. Last year, P.A. Semi released a 64-bit dual-core microprocessor that consumes a mere five to 13 watts running at two gigahertz. The company said it was 300 percent more efficient than any other chip.

‘Total Control’

So what could Apple do with that kind of know-how? Tina Teng, a wireless analyst at iSuppli, doubts Apple is just looking at controlling designs for future version of iPhone chips, which are currently supplied by Samsung. “Just to have an internal design for a product that’s going to be ready in the short term … it’s too much investment,” Teng said. She thinks Apple is looking down the road to a next-generation product, where Apple can benefit from “having total control of what areas P.A. will focus on.”

That’s not to say P.A. Semi won’t be involved in designing chips for the iPhone….

Orginal post by Top Tech News