Apple has purchased PA Semi.  The news story goes on to say that Apple will not consider Atom in their iPhone.  PA Semi makes low power PowerPC based chips.

Why am I not surprised? Given the power consumption of Atom, I think it still has long ways to go before we start seeing Atom based cell phones.

Update: cnet.com has a nice article on Apple’s purchase of PA Semi. Apparently no one knows what prompted the purchase! The article says that PA Semi’s powerPC consumes lot more power than ARM- so it will definitely not go into iPhones.