The answer to (1) is no. The GPU is integrated into the board. You would have
to have a company with the machinery manufacture a lot of boards to make
design changes. Even a small sample run (which is essentially what it sounds
like the Librem people are doing) for quality control purposes is expensive.
$250,000+ doesn't sound unrealistic.
The answer to (2) is no. The Librem project isn't designing chipsets and as
an individual there is no way you could pull it off. The companies designing
chipsets are billion dollar companies. Companies like Intel, Qualcomm, and
AMD. Companies like Apple, Dell, and similar are at best taking reference
designs, but even that's probably not going on in most cases. There are all
sorts of regulations that have to be complied with and certifications to get.
These are non-trivial projects and hugely complex systems. There are very few
companies deigning chipsets. Most are merely designing boards with those
chipsets on them and using reference designs from the company which designed
the chipsets. There is little difference in many cases (or no difference)
between products of different companies. At best you might find a company
like ThinkPenguin which is actively engaged in software development or
seeking source code/spec. But ultimately the hardware is largely the same
under the hood.
You can often find nearly identical boards:
For example the original CubbieBoard vs Banana Pi vs Odroid-C. The boards are
very similar although not entirely identical. However in many cases the
boards are identical. The differences might be as little as a change of the
logo in the firmware- or the change of a logo in the driver install program
(on some operating systems where you actually need to install a driver
anyway).
