I think saying "software" is much too broad, and you have to narrow the comparison to a small subset of software development for it to make sense. With software, typically you're dealing with vague and changing requirements, and the hope is that if you build five simple applications, four will be basically adequate as written, needing only incremental feature enhancements, and only the fifth needs significant work to rise to the emerging complexity of the problem. (The ratio can be adjusted according to the domain.)
In this case they're creating a new solution to a problem where all previous solutions have ended up extremely complex, and the existing range of software currently running on x86 and ARM gives them with a concrete set of examples of the types of software they need to make fast, so they're dealing with orders of magnitude more information about the requirements than almost any software project.
The closest software development equivalent I can think of would be building a new web browser. All existing web browsers are extremely complex, and you have millions of existing web pages to test against.
In this case they're creating a new solution to a problem where all previous solutions have ended up extremely complex, and the existing range of software currently running on x86 and ARM gives them with a concrete set of examples of the types of software they need to make fast, so they're dealing with orders of magnitude more information about the requirements than almost any software project.
The closest software development equivalent I can think of would be building a new web browser. All existing web browsers are extremely complex, and you have millions of existing web pages to test against.