This article smells like a software person looking at CAD from a technical standpoint without significant experience with complex product development or production. The reality is, the processes around CAD (namely R&D iteration, tooling production, fabrication and assembly process iteration, management thereof) cost far more than CAD does.<p>In short: who cares if something is single threaded when you are paying literally 100 times that person's salary per day in idle equipment, space and so forth? It's a rounding error. Buy a faster machine.<p>The industry broadly agrees with the author that greater integration between factory floor equipment and digital models is desirable and/or coming (Industry 4.0, etc.) however the complexity of this space is staggering.<p>To briefly explain: every fabrication process (or 'unit' operation in process management terms) has theoretical abilities in terms of part generation, modification or assembly but these are limited by equipment at hand (speeds, tolerances, tooling compatibility, maximum and minimum dimensions, etc.), time, knowledge/training, material and other inputs. Furthermore, equipment-specific maintenance schedules, power requirements, failure modes, consumable replacements and environmental parameters cannot be ignored. And that's before you have to look at aggregate tolerances, lasting effects of these processes on part materials, variations caused due to environmental conditions, temporary storage and movement of parts and inventory during production, secondary processes, human error, regulatory ingress, supply chain complexities, etc.<p>Typical products may include somewhere between 5-100 unit operations to produce, some can take 1000s or 10s of 1000s, especially if you include electronics fabrication, packaging and testing. Individual tooling assemblies often take months to produce, even years if multiple iterations are required. It's not something you use a single program to plan for. You need an experienced team, time, money and a plethora of systems.