It seems that they're working on it somewhat part-time, and have prioritised getting the patents first. Which makes some sense as it's their only way to avoid being instantly destroyed by Intel.
A newcomer can't sell yet another me-too, even with evolutionary improvement. Instead the newcomer has to rethink and create from first principles if it is to have any chance in the market. Rethinks can't be scheduled; they take as long as they take. Ours has taken longer than I'd hoped, but adding resources like more people to the project would have just slowed us down, or forced us to market with a broken product.
The Mill rethink stage is over, and we now can have reasonable schedules and put in more resources; that's why we are going out for a significant funding round this year, our first over $10M.
There's plenty of it on software side, too, with the proprietary DOS's and UNIX's. Foreign cloners stayed doing it with mainframes and embedded CPU's. So, incremental stuff (esp patented) can certainly grab market share and generate revenue. It's been going on for some time even in CPU market even with dominant players.
There's also personal strategy involved. If we had done a better X86 we would have needed huge dollops of money to crack the front door of the market - c.f. TransMeta - and lost ownership of the company. By going for the disruptive approach we still own all of it - and funding rounds now are at a valuation that will keep us making our own mistakes, not someone else's. That matters to me, enough to go without paycheck for a decade. YMMV.
Too right! 2017 is the year we get funding to go full-time and implement what we've been plotting at our Tuesday evening meetings for 10 years :)
Not that that's a huge market at this point, but apparently there's a lot of Fortune 500 interest so maybe that'll change by the time you're in production.