That's true, but the difficulty is it's not just going to take 12 months to do something like this. A radically new architecture would take years to become comp

That's true, but the difficulty is it's not just going to take 12 months to do something like this. A radically new architecture would take years to become competitive with today's processors for all of the use cases that would make it marketable. Meanwhile the x86 guys aren't just going to sit still, there's almost certainly more IPC to squeeze and they can add fixed function hardware (as they've already done for video encoding/decoding) or FPGA area in new product ranges and keep building new markets that way.