[baybal2]

> What Apple defies is common business survival instincts: why spent so much in RD of a chip if there are market leaders that are impossible to beat?

Having own silicon, means the upstream will not be able to turn lights on you (Samsung — a company keeping a quarter of its host country's GDP hostage.) I believe the immediate goal of PA Semi purchase was that.

> The answer seems to be obvious now... but probably it wasn’t obvious when Apple acquired PA Semi in 2008.

PA Semi was clearly a diamond in the rough. It took a great insight to single out PA Semi, because on the surface it was a very barebones SoC sweatshop, but in reality PA were the last of Mohicans of US chip design.

PA was a place where all non-Intel IC engineers left to after the severe carnage of microchip businesses of US tech giants like Sun, IBM, HP, DEC, SGI..., and etc.

It was a star team which back then was toiling at router box SoCs.