I am not going to comment on what could be construed as derogatory about one's design skills, but rather, I'll lighten the mood by sharing a recent experience where new-fangled technology helped me help the hardware designers with a performance problem...


Or leave the frequency alone and look in the nooks and crannies of processor facilities.

I won't go into details, but recently, we weren't able to decode a "serial interface bus" instruction quickly enough because of multiple rotate/shift instructions needed to extract fields out of the bus' instruction word.

Hey, looky-there, Dan sees that this FPGA soft-processor core has a barrel-shifter option, enables it, the compiler picks up that it's enabled and starts generating single, single-cycle instructions -- problem solved :-)