it does not cost anywhere near a billion dollars to design a processor. 
processor design is actually one of the very low-cost things, producing them
is bloody expensive when you need to build a $4bil fab to pay someone who 
did to use theirs. (gee, DEC had such a fab, too.. it was that idiot palmer
who didnt run it properly and lost money on it)
It is just that the Q is a peecee company, they dont understand, care to 
understand, or have the ability to understand, anything but PCs, they
haphazardly slashed the remnants of DEC into shreds and threw those to 
the wind, and anythign that isnt wintel confuses them mightily. 

isildur

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Jay Maynard wrote:
<bits recycled>
> you're willing to sink a billion dollars or so into it to make your vision a
> reality - with the great likelihood that that billion dollars will evaporate