content: You cannot truly make an open processor design without a financially feasible 3D printer capable of producing at least ARM level CPUs.  Completely false. It is common to use acid to burn away the top insulating layers of chips, which include CPUs. The entire circuitry is available for inspection under microscopes.  There is no feasible way for normal people to trust CPUs yet  Completely false. While it requires specialized skills there are plenty of "normal people" who have such skills are would be happy to validate both designs and manufactured runs. Even well motivated can compare diagrams against the circuit under a microscope. But of course that would require a non-trivial effort. Non-trivial is not the same as declaring it not feasible for normal people. The bigger threat is BIOS and UEFI, which are basically black boxes which control the startup and hardware initialization of everything on your computer.