MediaFile

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, perhaps best-known to today’s generation for doing the Argentine Tango with world champion Karina Smirnoff on “Dancing with the Stars,” weighed in this weekend on Apple’s apparent foray into chip design.

Wozniak was a calculator chip designer at Hewlett-Packard before he and Steve Jobs founded Apple. He said that designing a chip should only cost a few million dollars. If Apple, like all PC makers, continues to contract the manufacturing, the endeavor shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive.

“I have been pushing for it since we started the company,” Wozniak said in an interview on the sidelines of the National Inventors Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Silicon Valley last Saturday. “It’s a competitive advantage.”

“High-performance, low-power chips are the name of the game now,” he said, adding that Apple might want to create different layouts that would make chips faster or more energy efficient.

“Cell phone chips are sold in high volume,” he said, adding that because Apple is a small customer, it can’t get custom chips from its suppliers.

If anyone thought Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s new role as chief scientist for the data storage start-up Fusion-io would be ceremonial, think again. In an interview with Reuters, Wozniak said he plans to jump in and get his hands dirty.

“I’d actually like to go down and start evaluating the technology at the lowest level and the chips being made and who’s making them… I really think that technology of the future usually starts way down at the level of what components are made. How can they be made a little bit better? How can they be made in a way that would make the Fusion-io technology even more effective?”

Fusion-io officials said Wozniak grilled Chief Technical Officer David Flynn on technology issues before agreeing to sign on as an adviser to the company last year. The chat with the tech icon was likened jokingly to “a day at the principal’s office.”

We tend to think of the typical computer genius as introverted and withdrawn, not given to public displays like, say, dancing on television in front of millions of people. Obviously, Steve Wozniak -– who helped launch the personal computer craze -– is not your average technology geek.

ABC announced Sunday that Wozniak will compete against 12 other celebrities on the new season of “Dancing with the Stars,