The run of the mill engineer is indeed quite underpaid, but thats mostly because there is a mountain of gruntwork required to develop a modern chipset even with

The run of the mill engineer is indeed quite underpaid, but thats mostly because there is a mountain of gruntwork required to develop a modern chipset even with all of the automation tools out there. The engineers architecting the next generation of chips (think Jim Keller and the like) have millions or tens of millions in stock options.