> I once went to a talk by the Intel engineering manager who headed the Pentium Pro effort. That was the first superscalar x86 CPU
The original Pentium was already superscalar, with its asymmetrical U and V pipes.
The Pentium Pro added out of order execution via register renaming. A true achievement, indeed.
And as for the more general point you are making: computer chips have been far too complex for any single human to comprehend for decades. I left NVidia after working there as an archutect for five years, barely understanding anything about those behemoths.