It's building the business case and the revenues that makes this whole processor design discussion interesting. Not the microprocessor technology itself. Comp

It's building the business case and the revenues that makes this whole processor design discussion interesting. Not the microprocessor technology itself. Competitive microprocessor designs (in terms of speed, power, cost, volume and particularly the applications the users care about) are feasible but are Not Cheap, and to get the costs down (and the revenues up means you need to build the production scale. And building scale means leapfrogging the existing players in one or more dimensions sufficiently to draw over applications that the end-users really care about. You need to be significantly better here or sufficiently profligate with the application vendors and the resellers, or sufficiently compatible to overcome the inherent application inertia; you need to have enough "pull" (speed, power, cost, particularly applications) to build up a base. Without this, you're running a furnace with the contents of the corporate coffers. You can't be a just little better with your processor designs, either. That won't draw enough folks over. Both the Alpha and MIPS microprocessors had Microsoft Windows NT, and that (and even with porting tools such as FX!32) wasn't enough to build up an installed base against the x86 designs. Apple is playing the long game here.