[zephen]

> CPUs now dedicate a ton of silicon to decoding the CISC stream into RISC-y microcode.

In absolute terms, this is true. But in relative terms, you're talking less than 1% of the die area on a modern, heavily cached, heavily speculative, heavily predictive CPU.

[FartyMcFarter]

Didn't there use to be a joke about Intel being the biggest RAM manufacturer (given the amount of physical space caches take on a CPU)?

[zephen]

I hadn't heard that, but certainly, there must have been many times when Intel held the crown of "biggest working hunk of silicon area devoted to RAM."