1. They don't need to pay licenses per core, so they can put 48, 96 cores in a single machine.
2. Is ARM as powerful as Intel, of course not, but who cares? ARM is more efficient so just add more cores to it.
3.Apple already owns all development stack. They already created hardware emulators for previous chip changes. They will do it again.
> so just add more cores to it.
Oh my...thermals. I don't know where to begin. Scaling cores (even if they're efficient) poses many challenges - thermal, core-to-core bandwidth, interposer design issues and warpage, and most importantly, yield as the die size gets larger. Or you'd have to break up the core dice into many die and create fabric such as what AMD Epyc server chips are doing, etc...etc. A 96 core die with decent power envelope would be in the order of 300-500 watts.