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M2 is 20 billion transistors.

You'll get different answers depending on whether you're doing this as transistors or 74 series logic or whatever, but if we take discrete transistors and jam them in at 4 per square centimeter, that works out as 5bn cm^2 or half a square kilometer.

Frequency will then be limited by propagation delay across a square of that size. Maybe a few hundred kilohertz? Power .. megawatts? There's going to be a visible heat haze shimmering over your half square kilometer of transistors.

That is a fantastic image. Thanks!

This wasn't entirely out of discrete components; they had PALs, presumably representing fairly large sections of the processor's internal subsections.

The modern equivalent is simulation on a series of big FPGA, probably this one https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/virtex-...

Presumably they don’t create the hardware in FPGA and just simulate the thing in software?

Simulation in software is much slower than running the design in FPGAs.