I think this is very unlikely as 1. Apple is still almost required to follow the ARM ISA as a result of its licensing agreement 2. They will regard x86 emulation as a short term legacy issue (developers will recompile their Apps for ARM soon) and so why design and build in extra hardware you won't need long term and 3. Rosetta 1 worked fine without this sort of help.
I don't agree that this is so farfetched. As noted in a sibling, Apple has released ISA extensions before. If the architecture is decoding to uops anyway the addition of x86 helper instructions may not affect the architecture much at all (or may even be implemented in microcode). Further, the comparison between Rosetta 1 and 2 may not necessarily apply, as the switch to intel was (arguably) a more substantial perf increase over POWER.
ARM licensing requires any vendor to approach ARM for permission to extend the ISA. ARM may well deny that request and instead make it part of the main ISA instead
I presume the exact terms of Apple's license agreement with ARM are not public, so who knows exactly what is in it. It might have different terms from what ARM offers in the general case.
Apple execs had by far the upper hand while negotiating the contract than ARM execs did. The entire environment at the time was "we will do whatever apple wants".
Shortsighted really considering there weren't really any other options for instruction sets for apple to choose - all this stuff was signed before RISCV was a thing, and PPC and MIPS had pretty high barriers to entry (lots of porting work, lacking SIMD type instructions, and another migration for all apple devs) and poor performance.
I think 2. is the key point Apple will expect its developers to produce universal binaries very quickly. Once that has been done the issue has largely gone away. Plus not sure I agree that this is a smaller step up in performance when compared to POWER - certainly same order of magnitude.
