Its probably better stated, as its not hard to create a new processor, anymore than it is to create a toy OS. The hard part is creating something that is compe

Its probably better stated, as its not hard to create a new processor, anymore than it is to create a toy OS. The hard part is creating something that is competitive with top of the line commercial processors that have thousands of man years of R&D poured into them. Its not just verification, but the huge effort that goes into eaking out another couple percent on something like a branch predictor, or optimizing some "edge case" that turns out to be a significant portion of a benchmark if its not done correctly. Then there are all the general optimizations that give you a 10% uplift here and there. Worse, yet if you go with something that doesn't have a large installed software base (x86/arm/power?) because your going to be spending crazy amounts of effort doing compiler+application optimizations as well.