Well, first of all Apple could do it and fail. They&#x27;re done that before. They&#x27;re confident&#x2F;arrogant&#x2F;audacious enough to try things that they can&#x27;t pull off.<p>Also, they could take a two-pronged approach -- cherry-pick talent from Intel, nVidia, etc. and offer them the opportunity to leapfrog baggage from the past. How much of the difficulty of moving the x86 platform forward is a result of the ludicrous amount of cruft? Grabbing a few of the smartest people and narrowing your focus to an easier problem gets you a long way.<p>Apple has managed to outpace the entire industry (including Intel) with its customized ARM cores (getting to 64-bit over a year ahead of everyone, and take a look at benchmarks between Apple&#x27;s Ax CPUs and rivals usually running at far higher clocks with more RAM and sucking more power), and it got there by cherry-picking talent, omitting stuff it didn&#x27;t need, focusing on design, and treating fabs as a commodity.<p>Looks like interesting times ahead.