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I'm not sure CISC beat RISC, except for complicating the instruction set enough to keep costs high for competitors.

Underneath, Intel processors translate x86 to simpler RISC like microcode. They could make a more efficient chip without this translation component, and probably holds them back a bit in low power stuff.

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It's more like x86 beat everything, which is also saying that externally CISC/RISC didn't matter so much. I like the section on RISC here: http://danluu.com/butler-lampson-1999/ Specifically part of the last paragraph: "It’s possible to nitpick RISC being a no by saying that modern processors translate x86 ops into RISC micro-ops internally, but if you listened to talk at the time, people thought that having a external RISC ISA would be so much lower overhead that RISC would win, which has clearly not happened. Moreover, modern chips also do micro-op fusion in order to fuse operations into decidedly un-RISC-y operations."

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