Sure! For actual x86, they already have. You can make a perfectly good 32-bit chip with SSE2.

The patents on the core of x86_64 will expire in a couple years. Even if you can't have the more recent vector instructions, that's pretty good for a lot of use cases.

each of those 4 entities has whole teams devoted to building up the warchest of patents + colluding on standards to keep the balls in the air indefinitely.