The Apple marketing team is out in force to play down the company’s purchase of PA Semi as any suggestion that it might be returning to Power chips.

Apple’s tame press has been printing out other scenarios where the PA purchase makes sense alongside its Intel relationship. The official line seems to be that the sale is more about buying the talent needed to help customize designs on various chips Apple will need if they are to continue to innovate. In other words, Apple didn’t buy the outfit for its PWRficient processor, it bought it because there were shed loads of engineering expertise and low-power savvy on that company’s 150-person team. This would mean that it would work better with Intel.

For the record, this is the weakest bit of spin we have heard coming out of Cupertino. It is like saying that Microsoft is buying Yahoo because it has the expertise to help it form a better relationship with Google. PA Semi makes a bloody good chip and we are expected to believe that Apple thinks it is a good idea to ignore it?

Matters are made worse because the shift to Intel means that Apple has had to be more friendly to people adapting its boxes. Steve Jobs must look back to the good old days when no one could run any software on his pastel colored boxes that he did not approve of.

The Apple spin team have said that the PWRficient uses too much power to be useful to the iPhone and uses the same instruction set as Apple’s pre-Intel microprocessor, the PowerPC from IBM and Freescale. The line is that it’s extremely unlikely that Apple would force its developers to resume coding and, especially, optimizing their code for the PowerPC.

However, it does not answer the question as to why Apple bought the bloody thing in the first place. If it bought the outfit for its expertise it could have easily headhunted the lot for less money. It is more likely that Apple has plans for that chip and it is not going to tell anyone.