Agreed. Apple has acquired multiple companies and been building custom CPUs for 10 years with a significant sized design team. They paid about 280M for P.A. S

Agreed. Apple has acquired multiple companies and been building custom CPUs for 10 years with a significant sized design team. They paid about 280M for P.A. Semi in 2008. They reportedly also hired a number of DEC StrongARM refugees as well as several other small design teams. Apple was also an original ARM investor and have been using ARM cores for various uses for decades. A competitor also needs 10 years experience designing higher and higher performance ARM cpus in tremendously heat/power constrained systems (phones). There are a lot of long term threads that have come together in the M1 chip.