Well, whaddaya know about that? Barely half a week has passed since Motorola heir and CEO Chris Galvin announced his "retirement" due to an unspecified difference of opinion with the company's board of directors, and the press is already abuzz with reports of Motorola selling off chunks of its semiconductor business-- a move which analysts and shareholders have urged for years, but which, until now, seemed to fall on deaf ears. Kinda makes you wonder if maybe the particular deaf ears preventing any deals were the ones sticking out of either side of Galvin's head.

Unfortunately, this was one of those rumors that quickly shed more and more drama as the facts unfolded. Originally we'd heard various reports that Motorola was finally ready to sell off its entire PowerPC business to an "unspecified buyer"-- which immediately brought to mind those old rumors that Apple had once planned to buy Motorola's PowerPC division for half a billion dollars in hopes of, you know, maybe actually running it correctly or something. Then MacBidouille killed part of the buzz, claiming that the unspecified buyer was still in negotiations-- and was, in fact, Tundra Semiconductors and not Apple.

Then things got even less interesting when faithful viewer Ian Hornby pointed us in the direction of a Canadian Press article which revealed that Tundra isn't even interested in buying Motorola's PowerPC business at all; it only wants "Motorola's PowerPC Host Bridge line of computer interconnection technology, in which microchips connect main processors to other systems." So the processors themselves apparently don't even enter into the proposed deal. Of course, we suppose the upside to that is that if Apple did still want Motorola's PowerPC business, it's there for the asking; sure, it may seem a little superfluous now that IBM is firing on all cylinders, but Apple bringing its own PowerPC development in-house would give it a good degree of insurance in case Galvin winds up heading IBM and subsequently grinds chip development and production down to a slow crawl.

If you're still holding out hope that the Canadian Press article has its facts wrong and the situation is far juicier than Motorola just selling some interconnect technology to Tundra, quit holding your breath, because the sources of its info are pretty solid-- namely, Motorola and Tundra. It seems that, due to "human error," Motorola "inadvertently" issued a press release announcing the deal before the deal was actually done. Whoops. "They were all over themselves apologizing for the mistake," said Tundra CEO Jim Roche. Nice to hear that Galvin's imminent departure hasn't changed Motorola much after all, huh?