Unless you're NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung (you get the idea) why would you ever want to build anything besides "small and/or highly regular chips"?
I think there's a lot of interest in designing "highly regular" chips. And it's definitely possible to go quite far with open source tools. I've seen a 16-core general purpose chip with full 64-bit IEEE FP, ALU, and memory instructions operating at 1 MHz (real speed) as a gate-level simulation on a desktop computer. This could potentially be "running linux" at a reasonable (if sluggish) speed.
> Unless you're NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung (you get the idea) why would you ever want to build anything besides "small and/or highly regular chips"?
What's your point? The ASIC emulation market exists, there are several companies that build and sell ASIC emulators, and Xilinx and Altera cater to that market with dedicated FPGA devices. I'm not sure why you're arguing here.
I think there's a lot of interest in designing "highly regular" chips. And it's definitely possible to go quite far with open source tools. I've seen a 16-core general purpose chip with full 64-bit IEEE FP, ALU, and memory instructions operating at 1 MHz (real speed) as a gate-level simulation on a desktop computer. This could potentially be "running linux" at a reasonable (if sluggish) speed.