Also, they could take a two-pronged approach -- cherry-pick talent from Intel, nVidia, etc. and offer them the opportunity to leapfrog baggage from the past. How much of the difficulty of moving the x86 platform forward is a result of the ludicrous amount of cruft? Grabbing a few of the smartest people and narrowing your focus to an easier problem gets you a long way.

Apple has managed to outpace the entire industry (including Intel) with its customized ARM cores (getting to 64-bit over a year ahead of everyone, and take a look at benchmarks between Apple's Ax CPUs and rivals usually running at far higher clocks with more RAM and sucking more power), and it got there by cherry-picking talent, omitting stuff it didn't need, focusing on design, and treating fabs as a commodity.

Looks like interesting times ahead.