Re: Gatekeeping
And it's not like hobbyists don't have all sorts of ways to explore and tinker and make things. Just look at Hackaday or similar sites to see all the great things people are doing on their own.
If someone wants to play with custom chips, there are FPGAs, which will suit many purposes. I mean, most folks tinkering in the shed aren't looking to build thousands of commercial-grade CPUs to sell, so the performance and gate counts of off-the-shelf FPGAs would probably be fine for whatever experiments they want to do. Hell, simulators are probably fine for most of it. People have implemented SPARC-64 on FPGAs, for example.
It's really not clear what the hell OP was thinking people might do at home, but looking at the vast array of projects documented on "maker" sites like Hackaday I don't think individuals or even small teams would be able to be much more ambitious even with access to a fab.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
