At a meta-level, I wonder if there's this un-talked about advantage of poaching ambitious talent out of an established incumbent to work a new product line in a new organization, in this case Apple Silicon disrupting Intel/AMD. And we've also seen SpaceX do this NASA/Boeing, and OpenAI do it to Google's ML departments.

It seems like large, unchallenged organizations like Intel (or NASA or Google) collect all the top talent out of school. But changing budgets, changing business objectives, frozen product strategies make it difficult for emerging talent to really work on next-generation technology (those projects have already been assigned to mid-career people who "paid their dues").

Then someone like Apple Silicon with M-chip or SpaceX with Falcon-9 comes along and poaches the people most likely to work "hardcore" (not optimizing for work/life balance) while also giving the new product a high degree of risk tolerance and autonomy. Within a few years, the smaller upstart organization has opened up in un-closeable performance gap with behemoth incumbent.

Has anyone written about this pattern (beyond Innovator's Dilemma)? Does anyone have other good examples of this?

I'm not sure it really takes that kind of breakthrough approach. Apple chips are more energy efficient, but x86 can be much faster on CPU or GPU tasks, and it's much more versatile. A main "bug and feature" issue is the PC industry relies on common denominator standards and components, whereas Apple has gone vertical with very limited core expansion. This is particularly important when it comes to memory speed, where the standards are developed and factories upgraded over years at huge cost.

I gather it's very difficult and expensive to make a board that supports more channels of RAM, so that seems worth targeting at the platform level. Eight channel RAM using common RAM DIMMs would transform PCs for many tasks, however for now gamers are a main force and they don't really care about memory speed.