[dbancajas]

That's still part of the ISA right? And the 99% of silicon is not spent on those pain points you talk about. Architectural techniques are largely the same for high performance processors, be it ARM/PPC/x86. If you want high performance, you gotta put in the HW required. LSU, prediction, SMT hardware, branch prediction etc... The single thread speed has already been solved a long time ago. There's no point throwing away x86 in favor of a new ISA that has no guarantee of succeeding. In fact, having a new ISA that is incompatible with x86 will just be detrimental to intel/amd.