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Looking online about this company. Apple has acquired pa-semi for $278m in 2008 which translated in having the fasted arm processor by a wide margin a decade later, definitely paid out very well.

It took a lot less than a decade, they were already ahead when the A7 launched in 2013. So they took the lead in 5 years, and now have held it for another 5.

The company employed a 150-person engineering team which included people who had previously worked on processors like Itanium, Opteron and UltraSPARC.

Also principal designers of the DEC Alpha and the StrongARM, FWIW.

They hired some of the best and most experienced in the business. You get what you pay for.

They also bought Intrinsity, who designed the enhanced Cortex-A8 cores used in the Apple A4 and early Samsung Exynos SoCs.

And early Snapdragon, no?

Gotta go down as one of the best acquisitions, it is clearly a foothold for Apple that allows them to release products no one else can... Custom silicon chips are the basis for nearly all of their differentiating products - FaceID / Airpods / Apple Watch