Richard Irving, a partner at venture capital firm Pond Venture Partners, considers the purchase of PA Semi and Montalvo's technology assets, by Apple and Sun respectively.

The big surprises last week in Silicon Valley were Apple's purchase of PA Semi, and Sun buying Montalvo's technology assets.
Why did these OEMs buy their own processor? How much did they pay and did that constitute a good exit for the entrepreneurs and investors?
Until recently the conventional wisdom was that the x86 architecture reigned supreme in the computing space (all PCs and most servers), ARM-based processors led in mobile and low-power apps, and only comms infrastructure and industrial control remained CPU battlegrounds. Then Qualcomm launched Snapdragon and Intel its Atom, and the embedded space suddenly faced competition.
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