I remember reading that article some time ago DejaVu. One thing he touches on in the article is certainly true, and that is the time necessary to create an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) has dropped dramatically. He didn't go into a lot of detail on that, but it's common practice to have a number of predesigned cells available to a circuit designer. All he/she has to do is lay down the cells on the wafer and interconnect them. This greatly reduces the total amount of designing time spent creating certain types of ICs. I don't, however, see this design approach totally taking over the CPU market, especially the high end markets. Although design time is greatly reduced, when performance is of top priority this is not the best approach.
My personal opinion is that processor designs may become more application specific in nature, yet overall being very similar in design. You are already seeing this with the advent of the high end sound and video processors (GeForce, SB Audigy, etc) built onto boards which handle one very specific job, rather than forcing the main CPU to do all the work. Internally they often have many components common to the main CPU, but they are optimized for a specific task.
Recently I was talking with someone at HP about some experiments they are doing at the extreme end of this type of approach. Basically they are working on using very large numbers of structurally similar processors which each handle a small portion of a task. What was really interesting was how they communicated with each other and decided which processor would do what, but I don't know if I can share that openly. It's probably not a secret, but I'm not sure.
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SKurj, to be honest I've never broken the tabs on a CPU socket myself, but trust me when I say that you are not alone. This has been a problem that goes back far beyond the introduction of Socket A. Fortunately though, it looks like Intel and AMD are both switching to different retention mechanisms for their new CPUs. I'm not really sure if you can repair it, but I believe there are some socket A heatsinks that use those 4 holes around the CPU socket and screws to hold the heatsink on. At one time I knew that someone was making a heatsink of this type, but it's been quite a while ago. If you can find one you might be able to use the "broken" board again.
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As for review sites, I don't really have a favorite. I often read
http://www.anandtech.com and find the information there generally balanced and technically correct when they discuss the issues I'm familiar with.
http://www.tomshardware.com is another large review site, but unfortunately the quality and balance of their articles seems to vary depending on the author. To be honest, I haven't looked at much on sharkeyextreme in a long time. That's not to say that there's something wrong with it, I just don't have the time.
http://www.arstechnica.com is another site I can think of that writes infrequent articles, but usually the reviews are very technical and through examinations of the topic.
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I might give your idea a shot Animal, if only to laugh at myself in 5 years.
