I think it's wrong to look at patents as protecting "ideas." Economically, the purpose of patents is to prevent free-riding on cost-intensive R&D. Practically, their value is allowing R&D to be decoupled from production.

Samsung's Exynos is a good example. ARM is a small entity that does the hard R&D. Samsung has the manufacturing capability, but has to buy ARM's IP. Each company specializes in what they're good at, and patents mediate the transaction between them.