Just building your own microprocessor from gates is an easier way to learn about designing microcode and understanding how processors work(ed). But it can't hurt to study a few simple old designs like RISC or Transputer. The 80386 is on the other side of that spectrum, needlessly complicated because they wanted to be backwards compatible with an old bad design.

There certainly is no need to go to university to learn chip design. Watching a few Alan Kay talks [3] or browsing Bitsavers computer designs [4] are good starting points.

We made an easier way (than FPGA) to simulate and convert your gate level design into transistors on a chip (for less than $200 in 2026). We call it Morphle Logic [1].

Eventually you grow into making the largest fastest and cheapest supercomputer wafer scale integration [2].

[1] https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1605Zmwek8

[4] http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/alto/...