To be fair, these guys aren't Intel or even AMD or ARM - they're a small team with limited funding. I'm not going to be shocked of Mill themselves never releases production silicon, but worst case their novel ideas will only be under patent lock-and-key for a period of time - someone else will have the opportunity to make use of them eventually.

With that said, I'd love to see these things come off a fab line someday - there's a lot of potential in the ideas behind the Mill architecture, whether they'll pan out or not is to be seen, but if they fail I'd rather see another Itanic than to never make it to market in the first place.

Well, I don't think it's possible to design a novel general purpose processor overnight, so I'm not surprised that it's been four years coming. On the other hand listening to this talk I walked away with the impression that they're further away from making real chips (even engineering samples) than the last talk.

Whatever the case, I do hope they make it to market but maybe that's just my own morbid curiosity.

I personally totally keep my hopes high. I just don't hold my breath.

IIRC at the time of the first video they had already worked on it for around a decade. Personally I'm hoping that just means they have enough stamina to see it through and not that they'll never finish.