[plekter]

While in general I am very much in favour of playing both sides of an abstraction, I would argue that RTL is nowhere near the top of the stack.

In the GPU world, you have games, which are built on game engines, which are built against an API, which is implemented in a driver (which contains a compiler!), which communicates through OS abstractions with hardware, which is written in a HDL (this is where you write RTL!), which is then laid out in silicon. Now each of these parts of the stack have ridiculous complexity in them, and there are definitely things in the upper layers of the stack that impact how you want to write your RTL (and vice versa). So if your stack knowledge stops at RTL(which, honestly there is absolutely nothing wrong with!), there is still lots of fun complexity left in the stack.

[bharathw30]

I agree that the post is open-ended (by design, actually). I'm just saying there is a potential in chip design to combine some parts of the stack. (whatever that means to you.) "RTL-to-GDS" is considered the typical chip design flow.