My money is on two possibilities:

1. The fact that if Intel wanted to buy semi, they would probably have to fight an expensive legal battle due to monopolies and all that kinda stuff. Better way to get hold of/license that IP is to get their best buddies to acquire it, then they can work together - a true partnership...

2. If AMD doesn't sort themselves out, they may end up turning into ATI with a small embedded processor department. Nvidia haven't stepped forward to challenge Intel in the CPU arena yet, and may not bother for a bit. All this means is that Intel will end up with a monopoly because no-one will be able to compete. Then, like IBM and MS before them, they'll milk everyone dry, including the fruiterers. If you are so reliant on someone else's product, its a good idea to support their competition.

Or, it could be just some corporate scam thing - another way of dragging money out of Apple into Jobs' own back pocket...who knows...not unheard of for them to cook the books...

Has someone forgotton the whole concept of patent and technology sharing (for a price)? It's quite possible and even likely that his-jobs-ness forsaw this company being snapped up by one of it's partners. *cough* Intel. This is just the type of aquisition I would want to have in my wallet as a nice little bargaining chip. Anyone with an eye on tech knows this company holds some sweeeeet IP. When something like that becomes ripe pickin's either you do it or you watch someone else do it. Aaaaaand then hold it over YOUR head.

This fella's name is Dobberpull? You can't be serious!

Aren't you pulling my ... leg?

"five per cent of the computer buying world that loves their products" so assuming this is based on sales i could assume the only people that love enzo ferrari's or bugatti veyrons are those that go out and buy them? maybe everyone just can't afford quality built machines...

are ppl crazy or what? A chip that consumes 5-13W cannot possibly be used in an iphone or an ipod. So either Apple wants the engineers to design a completely new chip, which will take several years, or apple is designing a new product.

Right now, Leopard runs on PowerPC and x86 architectures (for desktop/server purposes) and ARM (for the iPhone) - so moving the iPhone to a PowerPC chip would reduce the number of architectures from 3 to 2. I suspect it'll be a long time before they can stop supporting PowerPC systems in OS X anyway.

The other possibility is including these chips as something other than the main CPU - many systems, particularly high-performance workstations and servers, have additional processors controlling things like networking and RAID storage - the current PA Semi offering seems ideally suited to this job, with fast iSCSI, SSL and TCP/IP features.