I'm actually a hardware engineer. I disagree that such a thing is only important in Software. You can easily validate any specific idea using cycle accurate simulators. If your intership didn't have enough time then fine. I would expect you continue working on the apparently golden idea your sitting. Nowadays you have a ton of pretty good softcores to choose from to test out an idea.
If the original author of a patent didn't find it worthwhile to pursue the idea for whatever reason I have very little faith in the idea to begin with. Taken to the extreme it's like saying I can turn lead into gold, and then never actually showing you actually making money that way.
> I'm actually a hardware engineer. <...> You can easily validate any specific idea using cycle accurate simulators
If anything, I'm less convinced than before that you understand how complex a modern CPU is. Perhaps you can re-read my comment; I essentially did what you are suggesting, but that wasn't enough, in my opinion, to glean any information about benchmarks in the real world. It took hundreds of hours. To make it slightly more realistic but still woefully inaccurate using licensable IP's and my own time/money without the company's buy-in seems absurd, even to the most stubborn HN commenter. The fact that we are modifying the L1/L2/L3 structure (perhaps you also didn't read the patent before commenting) makes this essentially re-designing large parts of the CPU from the ground up, at least as far as I understand licensable core IP.
> I would expect you continue working on the apparently golden idea your sitting
Why? No one ever said it was the golden idea. Only that I found it interesting. Apologies if my optimistic curiosity triggered your defenses.
Regardless, your statement makes no sense for other reasons. Perhaps there's a cultural gap (are you not American?). Here are some relevant points about US companies and patents I hope I can help you understand:
1. Big US corporations will patent anything novel, technical, and remotely related to the business as a means of protecting themselves against litigation. Most of these patents only see an initial technical committee, lawyers, and then are never seen again.
2. Inventors have zero individual rights to their patents when patented via company channels (in exchange, the company pays for the lawyers and usually grants a tiny stipend).
3. Interns typically do not influence how research budgets are allocated.
If the original author of a patent didn't find it worthwhile to pursue the idea for whatever reason I have very little faith in the idea to begin with. Taken to the extreme it's like saying I can turn lead into gold, and then never actually showing you actually making money that way.