It’s kinda crazy now to look back at a time when Apple didn’t have its own chips. Especially after the past two years, where the M-series processors for the Mac have completely up-ended the PC industry and has caused Intel to pretty much go back to the drawing board (SOC and business-wise). 15 years ago, the idea was so farfetched that Apple would design it’s own chips, that when it came out that Apple bought P.A. Semi, a lot of folks didn’t even see the move as Apple jumping into the game. From Macworld…

“Put another way, Apple didn’t buy P.A. Semi for its PWRficient processor (known more prosaically to chipheads as the PA6T-1682M). Instead, it bought the engineering expertise and low-power savvy of that company’s 150-person team in order to better work with suppliers such as Intel.“

Wow. The article even goes on to say that the most likely product to get a low powered Apple chip would be the Apple TV, and to not expect one in your iPhone or Mac.

I’m sure having the talent Apple acquired did help in some regard assisting Intel when integrating their chips into Macs, but to think that was the overall goal even back then seems a little crazy. It was less than two years after the purchase that Apple took their first swing at their own processor with the iPhone 4. Three years after that was when the iPhone 5s came out, and Apple seemingly did the unthinkable and released the first 64-bit ARM chip in a smartphone and leapfrogged everyone (and they already had a pretty decent leg up on the competition already).

The craziest thing look back at the acquisition now though? The price. $278 million. Million. Yes, it was a very small 150 person shop with not much to show for other than the talent they had. But I can’t think of any other single investment made by any tech company that compares to the returns we see from this one. In less than 15 year they went from maybe this will help them working with intel, to completely kicking Intel itself to the curb. Amazing.

Quote cited form MacWorld https://www.macworld.com/article/190332/pasemi.html