[willvarfar]

A long time ago, when RISC was first posited, we all thought that RISC vs CISC was a big deal.

But these days, not really. Peel back and peer at the CPU and they all look and work much the same. The CISC implementations typically convert to their own simplified instruction subset internally, and the RISC crowd keep adding fatter and fatter CISC-like instructions.

So its not really an x86 instruction set problem. The legacy that Intel (and, a lesser extent, AMD) seem to struggle to overhaul is in their architecture, not the instruction set itself.

This is proven by the M1 doing binary translation of x86 and still being faster than the Intel chips.

[jonplackett]

> This is proven by the M1 doing binary translation of x86 and still being faster than the Intel chips

That’s the real kick in the nuts for intel isn’t it. I bet apple could have jumped last year or before and been ahead in native performance. But waiting meant they even beat intel at their own game, while massively handicapped.