P.A. Semi built a powerful and power-efficient Power ISA processor which solved all the problems Apple had with the Power architecture at the time.
What did Jobs do? He bought the company and closed it immediately so that nobody noticed that the switch to Intel was not only completely unnecessary but also a big mistake.
You're being downvoted hard which I feel is unfair.
The first part of your statement is true, they built the PA6T and was acquired by Apple. The second is your opinion. Mine is that Jobs wanted the team and acquired Palo Alto Semi to get the expertise not the chip.
And who knows, maybe Jobs didn’t set them on anything. Maybe he bought PA intending to use their existing bus technology but someone at PA pulled him aside and said “Hey, we don’t think you should waste your time with this. How about we design [what is now their ARM line]?”
A single chip oriented at embedded systems can’t be said to have “solved all the problems Apple had” — and after years of falling behind, they really needed to get past the performance issue & its ensuing heat/reliability/cost problems. Customer loyalty only stretches so far and only the Intel option reliably closed the gap across product lines.
Putting the team to work on the future made sense: they’re incredibly profitable, the software has matured in key ways making it easier to port, and they’re moving after years of hitting high targets annually.
I'm sympathetic to this view but PA6T wasn't going to solve Apple's problems: it was clearly better than the G4, but Apple needed G5-level performance in their next generation laptops as table stakes, and PA6T just doesn't get there (see the AmigaOne X1000 as an example). It also was not at all clear at the time how scalable the microarch was, and it was coming from a company with even fewer (albeit some brilliant, as Apple has proven) engineering resources, so it would have been a big bet that Apple did not want to lose. We'll never know the answer, of course.
What did Jobs do? He bought the company and closed it immediately so that nobody noticed that the switch to Intel was not only completely unnecessary but also a big mistake.