The problem is that basically Qualcomm is strangling the entire cellphone space. So what if you built a completely new, much faster, much better-in-every-way So

The problem is that basically Qualcomm is strangling the entire cellphone space. So what if you built a completely new, much faster, much better-in-every-way SoC... if you still have to pay Qualcomm for the entire chipset because they refuse to sell you just the modem without you paying the full bill. Multiple designers could run circles around Qualcomm, but the marginal cost of doing so combined with the number of CPUs you'd have to mint to do so makes it a losing proposition. Apple's in the unique position of being able to leverage Intel to bend Qualcomm over a barrel, and Qualcomm fires back with a gazillion lawsuits and New York Times articles that cry "woe is me, Apple is eating my lunch!" On a different topic, benchmark navalgazing is probably not going to help anyone. Every company that's been designing CPUs from the mid 80s on has been writing benchmark defeating code, and I'm 100% certain PA SEMI/Apple is no different; they certainly have the silicon space to waste writing Application-specific-accelerators for acing benchmarking tasks, especially on a platform with as much opacity as Apple holds over the iPhone.