News today is that Apple has purchased another processor company called Intrinsity. Apple purchased PA Semi two years ago for almost a quarter of a billion dollars. The Intrinsity news was broken by EDN but followup work by MacRumors seems to have confirmed the purchase.
This follows news last month that many of the high-ranking PA Semi team members that had come to Apple as a result of the purchase of the company in 2008 had been defecting to various startups over the past year.
Former CEO, Dobberpuhl split last year and Mark Hayter quit earlier this year.
It is unlikely that we'll ever know exactly what happened but perhaps PA Semi's talent wasn't working out for Apple's needs and needed to go elsewhere to get their iPAd product out the door..
Intrinsity is the remnants of Exponential, a company that was supposed to come out with crazy fast PowerPC chips in the late 90s. Recently, however, they'd been working with Samsung building faster ARM Chips. Coincidentally, Samsung is the manufacturer of all of Apple's previous iPhone and iPd touch ARM processors. That's likely where Apple met up with Intrinsity.
Apple and ARM both have a big presence in the Austin Texas area and as Intrinsity's employees resumes switch over to Apple's on April 1st, maybe they'll just move down the street to Apple's offices.