Comment by RugnirViking

I would suggest that on some level we're still well inside "cleverness of the design" territory BUT that that hides a lot of complexity and nuance - for example we really haven't started to take advantage of the third dimension by any reasonable means. a perfectly optimal cpu would probably look more like a sphere than a flat square chip.

To my limited understanding we have started with layering techniques but its still pretty early days.

The reason we dont do that more is both because of difficulty in design but also manufacturing.