Cortex A12: Serving the Mid-Range Market

This makes me wonder about ARM. On the one side you have architecture licensees like Apple and Samsung who are building their own "super A9" type cores, on the other you've got customers who want to compete with those guys who can't afford to design their own chips. So ARM makes them one?

How does that story end? Clearly it could be a huge drain on ARM resources if they are designing what are ultimately low volume CPUs (between Samsung and Apple they make up perhaps the largest chunk of A9+ shipments) everyone else is behind waiting on ARM and their 'standard' SOC vendors.

Makes it really challenging to analyze and/or strategize in the ARM market.