> That includes the discipline to be ruthless about exterminating complexity and saying no. That’s institutionally hard.

You need to make a product that out-performs your competitors. If their chip is faster then your work will be ignored regardless of how pure you managed to keep it.

> We may be past the window where rethinking architectural choices is possible.

I think your presumption that our architectures are extremely sub-optimal is wrong. They're exceptionally optimized. Just spend some time thinking about branch prediction and register renaming. It's a steep cliff for any new entrant. You not only have to produce something novel and worthwhile but you have to incorporate decades of deep knowledge into the core of your product, and you have to do all of that without introducing any hardware bugs.

You stand on the shoulders of giants and complain about the style of their footwear.

That’s another reason current designs are probably locked in. It’s called being stuck at a local maximum.

I’m not saying what we have is bad, just that the benefit of hindsight reveals some things.

Computing is tougher than other areas of engineering when it comes to greenfielding due to the extreme interlocking lock-in effects that emerge from things like instruction set and API compatibility. It’s easier to greenfield, say, an engine or an aircraft design, since doing so does not break compatibility with everything. If aviation were like computing, coffee mugs from propeller aircraft would fail to hold coffee (or even be mugs) on a jet aircraft.