> RISC has only a handful of instructions, that all take 1 clock cycle (with pipelining).

This isn't really the case with modern ARM. Fundamentally modern ARM and x86 CPUs are designed very similarly once you get past the instruction decoder. Both 'compile' instructions down to micro-ops that are then executed rather than executing the instruction set directly so the distinctions between the instruction sets themselves don't matter all that much past that point.

The main advantages for ARM come from the decode stage and from larger architectural differences such as relaxed memory ordering requirements.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/13480/did...