[LegionMammal978]

The main issue with that argument is that the L1i cache can never realistically be exhausted fast enough to form a bottleneck, as long as the decoder is working ahead of the start of the execution pipeline.

The hard limit on instruction size is 15 bytes, so a 64-byte cache line will always be able to store at least 4 of them. (Or 3 plus the tail of an instruction from a previous line.) Meanwhile, on the other end, Intel cores can only retire up to 4 μops per cycle. Since each instruction takes at least 1 μop (except for macro-fusion, which only works on short instructions), retirement will always form a bottleneck before decoding can.

And in realistic code where you'd actually see these long instructions, i.e., hot SIMD loops, all the decoded instructions would stay warm and toasty in the μop cache (allegedly holding 6 fixed-size μops per cache line) after the first iteration.