> And whereas designing your own chips once meant having to make them as well, that is no longer true.
This hasn't been true for what, 15-20 years? Longer? If you had a digital design and enough cash you could have gone to one of many vendors, who in turn worked with an external fab such as TSMC (or in other cases, the fab division of the same company) to create your design. When working with a vendor like Broadcom, Agere, Toshiba, IBM, Intel, Marvel you can be entirely isolated from the physical aspects of making chips, if that's what you want. What has happened over the last few years is massive consolidation of these vendors so now the options are far more limited. It's basically just Broadcom or Marvel at the cutting edge. I don't think this goes anywhere to explain why more companies are designing their own chips but it's a more accurate description of reality.
This hasn't been true for what, 15-20 years? Longer? If you had a digital design and enough cash you could have gone to one of many vendors, who in turn worked with an external fab such as TSMC (or in other cases, the fab division of the same company) to create your design. When working with a vendor like Broadcom, Agere, Toshiba, IBM, Intel, Marvel you can be entirely isolated from the physical aspects of making chips, if that's what you want. What has happened over the last few years is massive consolidation of these vendors so now the options are far more limited. It's basically just Broadcom or Marvel at the cutting edge. I don't think this goes anywhere to explain why more companies are designing their own chips but it's a more accurate description of reality.