"a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find."
I think you forgot the /s. Plus reddit is mostly bots now driving engagement, with AI slop splattered everywhere. It went from bad to worse in just a few years. I scan the homepage without an account every now and then and it's awful.
A lot of steps are missing, seems like OP doesn't have much experience. Sure, you can license ARM or download RISC-V, configure and validate the RTL (even configurations with no RTL changes require RTL validation, and a mountain of test vectors), license some analog IP from Synopsys for analog, power and clocking; synthesize your design, place and route, timing converge, functionally validate against the RTL, lay out pinmap and bonding rules, fracture the DB, send the GLS to TSMC, validate the package characteristics and process corner, do post-silicon debug of ROM/timing/package/digital/analog, and maybe if the gods smile on you it'll only be one stepping and won't need any FIB edits ... but that requires an army of people to get it done in under a year. Re-designing a modern ISA would take one person decades, look how long the first cut of RISC-V took with genius volunteers. Maybe if you want to build a 6502 on your own for fun and can cough up $50k for a 0.180 micron shuttle at TSMC or Global Foundries. It's fun to fantasize about AI making all this happen automatically, but chip design is wildly nontrival. Its funny, Sematech talked about 3rd (or 4th?)-generation silicon design where humans would be taken out of the loop entirely within the next decade... back in 1993!
(Source: I've been a CPU Architect going on my fourth decade.)
I think you forgot the /s. Plus reddit is mostly bots now driving engagement, with AI slop splattered everywhere. It went from bad to worse in just a few years. I scan the homepage without an account every now and then and it's awful.