Hey, chipmakers deserve more credit than that! I'm a chip architect and we license from IMG and we license IP from others as well, but then there's a shitton of work and plenty of things which can go wrong, costing loads of money and big delays. For those chip makers rolling their own IPs, this is rarely the biggest risk, the biggest risk is integrating everything into a working, marketable chip delivered more or less on time and within budget.

Incidentally, the reason why chip companies are worth so much more than IP companies is that the cost and risk of making chips is much larger. IP and chip companies are both fabless, if the costs and risks were about the same, then I don't see why profits wouldn't be about the same.

Now it could be that in this instance, marketability, schedule and budget weren't a particularly big deal, and maybe the performance is so bad that this in itself made a lot of problems disappear. But I think it's likely that someone still sweated quite some to make it work. (TFA claims they were the first to implement this CPU in silicon, BTW - again, could be easy enough if they didn't care about performance at all, or if Imagination did all the work on the synthesis scripts and the backend or held their hand, but if they wanted high performance and had to optimize synthesis and placement themselves, that's serious work. TSMC won't do it for you, either - they want a GDS-II file, and I don't think they outsourced the actual chip design.)