Another Q for the architects in here

[Sunner]

I was curious, how easy is it for a CPU designer to shift design types?

Say if someone who was working on the Pentium 5 at Intel suddenly got a real good offer from nVidia, and went that route to design their next gen GFX part.
How easy/hard would that transition be?

How similar are the tasks of deigning, say an x86 CPU, a sound DSP, and a GPU?

 

[RaWk]

From my experience in design engineering here is what I think:

The engineer working on the next gen Pentium would be working on such a small part of the overall design that he couldn't exactly port over the ALU to his work at NVDA. Now, all of the problem solving skills and such that he learned while working on the say, memory interface could be applied to problems he may run into working on the memory interface of the next NVDA graphics chip.

So are methodologies easily portable? yes. Are direct copies of architecture? Yes, if you are planning your design on it (this is what third party IP companies are for) but for one engineer to come in and cut and paste the ALU from the next gen pentium into the next gen GForce...I don't think so...

just my $.02