software used to be hardware limited, and therefore efficient. Today Software relies on many more transistors per joule to compute a number of operations in high-level languages. I'd agree 22nm isn't leading edge, but foundries like Skywater could theoretically provide more options at 65nm and 90nm in coming years that are fully open source, except for the cost of the foundry technique perhaps: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/1130-19.07.18-L...