Have you bought YOUR chip company yet?

Everyone's doing it! Within a few days of each other, both Sun and Apple bought a chip designer. Apple's makes low-power PowerPCs, Sun's makes (imaginary, as yet) low-power x86s.

Funnily enough, before the Apple/Intel deal, it was widely expected that they would use processors from said PPC designer in their laptops. Interesting... Apple, of course, have kept their options for fleeing to another platform quite open; just about all Apple applications are still compiled for PPC and Intel, which forces developers to consider endian issues and so forth, and a move back to PPC would be particularly easy. However, Apple seems to have most-favoured-vendor status with Intel at the moment, so a move at the moment doesn't look likely. Still, Apple has been known to dump chip makers rather publicly and violently (Motorola over the G4, IBM over the G5), so maybe they're keeping their options open.

Sun's move is more obvious. They bought a low power x86 company. They have a low-power many-cored UltraSparc (T1/2/2+/3) themselves, and would no doubt like to improve it with IP from the acquisition. They might also be interested in making many-cored, low-power x86s, stealing a march on Intel and AMD.

Interesting, nonetheless. I wonder who will be next to buy a weird chip designer? I'm sure Sun is eyeing Azul...