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It's incredibly complex designing any core but it'll be a lot simpler than trying to design an x86.

It is a frighteningly expensive business:

You need:
1) For an ARM core you'll need an architecture license, I don't know the price but I once heard a rumour of $20 million.
2) A group of very clever and experienced people. They're hard to find and not cheap.
3) A very large computer to run the EDA software on. So large it'll be in the Top500 supercomputer list.
4) EDA software. All of it fear inducingly expensive (it's typically priced in the hundreds of thousands.) ...and you need lots and lots of it.
5) Time - it takes years to design a core. We might see what the PA-Semi team at Apple have been up to next year.
6) Cell libraries - you're not going to design you're own transistors so you buy designs for them.
7) Silicon. A new core will require several revisions at a millions each (I suspect the $5.4 million was for a new revision). It normally takes 3 months to make a chip so getting it right takes quite some time - at least a year.

It depends on the complexity of course but don't expect much (if any) change out of $100 million. Intel and AMD and the likes of Nvidia each spend around $500 million to design a new core.

- All that before they go into production.


While there are a number of companies that design ARM cores, ARM makes most of it's money from selling pre-designed cores. They're not exactly cheap but it's a fraction of the price of designing your own core. You also pay a royalty per chip you make. It's not much per chip but at over a billion per month it adds up.

ARM also do most of the stuff that goes around the core - bus systems, memory controllers and other cores like GPUs etc, etc. This gets used on all sorts of chips, not just ARM based.