Apple Purchases Efficient Chip Maker for $278 Million

On Wednesday, Apple announced that it had purchased P.A. Semi, a processor company that could make chips for future iPods and iPhone. The company, founded by Dan Dobberpuhl (formerly a lead designer of Alpha chips) announced a 64-bit dual core processor stated to be about 300% more efficient than its nearest competition while running at 2 GHz and using only 5 to 13 watts of power in the process.

Products derived from the chips are at least a year down the pipe and the move marks a departure from Apple's relationship with ARM and Intel, which it also relies on for processors.

The P.A. Semi chips themselves are modeled on a licensed version of the PowerPC architecture and research shows that the chip sports over 25,000 clock gates, allowing different regions of the processor to be shut off dynamically in order to save power. Beyond this, each of the chip's major on-die component feature their own separate clock and voltage domains, allowing the L1 cache, L2 cache, DRAM controller, I/O subsystem and each of its cores to be placed in different low-power states independently of each other.

Current speculation states that devices such as the iPhone and iPod wouldn't run at the speedy 2 GHz mentioned and it's unlikely that Apple would use a dual core 64-bit chip in Macs, given that the Intel switch occurred so recently. Additional speculation has pondered that P.A. Semi has an unannounced mobile chip up its sleep that Steve Jobs was interested in, especially when he held negotiations with P.A. Semi in his own home.

Intel's mobile platform, referred to as "Atom", by comparison, can do 0.8 watts of usage at 800 MHz, and VIA has a 0.1 watt solution that runs at 500 MHz. ARM, designer of the current iPhone chip, is boasting that they can create a 0.25 watt A9 chip with multiple processor cores at 1 GHz.

Oddly enough, P.A. Semi was contending to be Apple's chip provider of choice around the time Apple went with Intel and it was reported that Dobberpuhl was furious with Apple when they went x86, thinking the Intel talks were just a bargaining chip.

Stay tuned for more news on this as it becomes available.

[Via Gizmodo]