Apple has just gone and spent some hard cash on a microprocessor design company called P.A. Semi which specializes in multi-core low power processors based on IBM's Power PC cores.

Their first low power part goes under the name of PWRficient PA6T-1682M, and was announced in February last year. Not much has been heard about this CPU since, although it has been taken onboard for some industrial designs and a disk array by NEC.

Apple was close to buying P.A. Semi back in 2006, before it struck up a deal with Intel to use its Core 2 processors, but judging by this, Apple might consider a move back to its roots with a new generation of Power PC derived processors.

The PWRficient PA6T-1682M is clocked at 2GHz and has 128Kb of L1 cache per core and a shared 2MB L2 cache. The CPU also has built-in dual DDR2 memory controllers with support for memory speeds of up to 1,066MHz and up to 16GB per channel.

Right now it's being speculated that Apple is considering using these processors for its future iPhone and iPod products, but we suspect there might be more to it than this.

All the same, this is a peculiar move by Apple, but maybe, just maybe, Apple isn't happy with the performance of Intel's Atom processor and decided to get an exclusive solution for future products in this way.

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