(I cut out the large amount of text to prevent the mail length from growing to 
the extreme)

Basically, if money and time were no issue, you had one real blocking issue 
preventing you from just buying an Intel CPU and building a system around it: 
legal reasons.
Intel does not give anyone the information needed to completely build a 
comparable platform around one of their CPUs.  Perhaps you could (since you 
could have infinite money) buy Intel or a controlling part of Intel to 
influence this, but that’s about it.
Another thing locked by legalese documents would be people that have the skills 
and experience to do this. There aren’t a lot of them and almost all of them 
work at Intel. 

The x86 platform is not just about some registers, some PCB design and some 
code, if that was all there was to it, anyone could build something with the 
right information. There is deep knowledge and insight at the implementation 
level of the silicon and microcode (and bootrom!) required to build something 
around an Intel CPU from scratch. Some legal measures prevent people at Intel 
from working at a comparable job in a competitive manner. At the same time, 
those people might have status or perks in a non-monetary fashion that you 
cannot give them. Short of stealing people, you may simply not have a way to 
get access to the people required to build anything.

So, would it technically be possible to build something from scratch based on a 
Intel CPU? Yes. But it is not feasible. Not even with 1000 people and a billion 
dollars. Perhaps with 100k people and 100 billion dollars.

Regards,
John

> On 4 Sep 2018, at 18:16, Peter Stuge <pe...@stuge.se> wrote:
> 
> [ …]

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