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I still have to agree with Dan. "If there's any threat to x86, it's ARM, and it's their business model that's a threat, not their ISA."


I would have believed this before the M1, but now I think fixed-width instructions are great for parallel decode, so there's a real threat now which is attributable to RISC.


Fixed-width decode only one of the ideas of "RISC," but not the main one. I would argue that modern ARM is almost as much of a CISC-y abomination as was x86 in 1999. ARM has a lot of instructions that do multiple things and are very non-RISC.

POWER is probably the most RISC-y architecture in use at the high end right now, but it still looks like CISC to the people who originally came up with that idea.




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