9 months to production is completely impossible anyway.
9 months from design to early samples is probably impossible given than TSMC takes 3 months after tape out to produce them. Then it’s up to the customer to qualify and revise for production. TSMC doesn’t do that.
In the chip design world, 2:1 for design verification to design is on the low end of normal.
Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.
When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.
My solution is that I no longer contribute to the public internet in any meaningful way. No more open source projects. No more contributions to free software. Bug reports only when it helps me. The hacker ethos is dead. Selfishness and greed won.
Silicon Valley builds empires off the back of free intellectual labor. I'm done with all of it. If they want something from me they can (and do) pay for it.
I don't know of any CPU that speculates both sides of a branch. I work on a CPU design team.
Modern CPUs speculate hundreds of instructions ahead, and with just a dozen branches you can have a few thousand different paths. It makes more sense to speculate down one path with very high accuracy.
Software table walk performance is bad on modern out of order processors because it has to finish every older instruction in flight and redirect the front end to the exception vector. This can take several hundred cycles. Hardware table walk can take <20 cycles to hit in the next level cache.
As a professional EE, I know that ARM Cortex-M4 is not a chip. It's an embedded processor that is put into an SOC (which is a chip), such as the STM32-family from ST.
Having multiple threads does not mean that they are all doing equally useful work. Single threaded performance is absolutely critical for a desktop machine.
Even in multithreaded desktop applications, it's rare to see them effectively use more than 8 threads.