If Qualcomm and other ARM chip designers haven't been able to keep up to pace while the last 8 years of iPhone CPUs have been near the top of their game, I don'

If Qualcomm and other ARM chip designers haven't been able to keep up to pace while the last 8 years of iPhone CPUs have been near the top of their game, I don't see that changing anytime soon, unless they hire the right people to be in charge and even still, chips like Apple's A series are hand laid out and very, very time consuming to create. They have the ability to use a scanning electron microscope to look at the design, but even if you can start to reproduce their design (very time consuming) you're taking away resources from designing other processors. I asked a friend who used to work in chip design at IBM and was blown away by the design of the M1. according to my friend, the design is extremely custom and most likely hand laid out for their specific optimizations. Also they were stumped by how apple could be getting consistent timings between cores when the design isn't totally symmetric for a particular cluster.