It really seems like Apple is ahead of the curve on mobile R&D. I wonder if they'll ever consider reselling some of these chips. It's unlikely Steve Jobs would've ever done it, but I'm not so sure about Tim Cook.
Apple bought PA Semi so they could be in charge of chip design and not have to share with anyone else. It's a competitive advantage, and Tim Cook isn't stupid. He won't license away a crown jewel for a few short-term dollars.
People mightn't want to buy them if they did. These chips are _big_, which means that they're expensive to make. Apple can get away with it because their only costs are manufacture and licensing, and because they have high margins which can absorb a bit of a hit. If they were selling them, though, they'd presumably want to make a profit, and that profit would make the end product almost certainly the most expensive mobile chip on the market.
From a marketing point of view, too, it'd be a hard sell in Android-land. Apple has been very careful to steer clear of spec-oriented marketing, but can you imagine the less-sophisticated enthusiast market's response to, say, the Galaxy S6 using a dual-core 1.3GHz chip instead of a quad-core 2GHz?
What about something for the server market? I know some companies have been switching to ARM chips as a low-power alternative in large server farms. It seems a 64-bit chip might be a good fit in that market.
IMO it's unlikely. It seems like Apple has to go through a lot to meet their own manufacturing needs, so ramping up production just for third parties would put even more strain on the already-large demand.
Plus, from a market standpoint, Cyclone was developed to meet Apple's own needs. To sell these chips would introduce a "demand" variable into the equation that I think would stifle development.
At any rate, this is a really interesting topic because I think that Apple's oft-critized isolation actually worked much to its own benefit here.
