[titzer]

> Avoiding this would increase complexity somewhere else, e.g. compilers would have to become even more clever

Not really. Compilers are already stupendously complicated since they inherit a ton of techniques used for older processors that required, e.g. instruction scheduling and other tricks. CPUs getting bigger and faster just added additional complexity to extract even more dynamic parallelism and also do the job of simpler compilers.

It's much easier to turn off the complexity in a compiler and reason about the resulting program. The complexity in the CPU cannot be switched off and is closed source.

Gimme simple CPUs again.