I'm sorry but you clearly do not know about this field. Take a step back and stop pretending you do. Try to unlearn everything you learned from Semiaccurate because it is not even semi-accurate. Pick up a few books on Circuit Theory, Differential Equations, Digital Design, Analogue Electronics. Once you get some grasp of the topics, go study CMOS design. This will take you a few years. Then when you're done try churning out designs according to engineering specs, and you will see what a complex process it is. IT is not a bunch of nerds hashing things out in english language terms you can fit on an oppinionated blog or forum post.
Sorry but please point out where I said chip design wasn't complex, I dare you, or double dare you.
I said, and try to READ it, the FIRST STEP. If you are really trying to convince someone that the first step for designing a chip, isn't deciding what you want in it, and then working out what you can actually fit in it, it is you that should apparently re-read your books.
I said nerds, not because its bad, but when everyone is listing everything they want, and its about chips its basically geek porn. You quite simply get a bunch of people in a room, the right people if you can, and ask quality engineers where they, and the clients/dev's, software people, console guys, want in future chips, then they have their geek porn list of every awesome feature that could possibly be in their next chip, and scale it back to something reasonable, and do-able.
EDIT:- lastly, can you name the last over 500mm2 chip, or hell the last over 400mm2 chip that actually got to market without problems.
Off the top of my head, there is the 2900xt, the 280gtx, the 480gtx, the 580gtx, and SB-E.
2900xt, around 420-450mm2 iirc, yield problems, heat problems, expensive and not good enough. 280gtx, they wanted 256 shaders, they had to cut that down early as Nvidia decided 256 was too big, it had some yield problems and missed clock targets marginally, 285gtx they had a hard to shrinking it, it took a LONG time to come out and it was a very small scale shrink. 480gtx, disaster, multiple respins, millions down the drain, horrible yields, never ever made it to market as a full product. 580gtx, is officially called a GF100B(or was), its simply a full respin, its a design a year late, a good design, who said it wasn't, but it was the end of a LONG run of severe and costly problems, and all indications are, it has not particularly good yields at all. SB-E, 435mm2, yield problems, was supposed to be out 6 months ago, many of the interconnects caused problems, PCIe-3 is on there, and not working as are a few other bits and bobs.
All in all, I can't easily name a single chip over 400mm2 that hasn't had problems since the 8800gtx, which came out on a mature 90nm process, what, over 5 years ago.
). Didn't even ATI have yield problems at first with the 5000 series? (and they're fairly small chips!)
) Unfortunate really as I'd like to have more faith in them ¬_¬
