Production grade CPU design is more than just the RTL (the source code.) To achieve the performance numbers that these companies get, you have to do a ton of optimization in your physical design to achieve the power/performance/area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.

There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.

Isn't that weird? The full knowledge of how to make such chips may one day be accessible to anyone, yet only the entrenched companies will remain the makers.

If we imagine machines being able to do the full process end-to-end, and the quality of that process only dependent on capital spent on tokens, I don't see how new companies could ever enter the market.

It is probably doable right not to push a risc-v design into that performance space.

They won't, because they'd need an ARM architecture license.

And be super-bankrupted by patent litigation from Apple. I don't think they're worried.

After all, they successfully threatened Adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they joined w/ apple in illegally fixing wages.

You don't think a criminal like apple would absolutely decimate any competition given the opportunity? They didn't hold back when it was a unambiguous crime, they surely wouldn't if it was merely bad for the world.