I agree, compression becoming 'free' or 'better than free' is counter-intuitive and yet it can be a performance improvement. Perhaps we may see another change i

I agree, compression becoming 'free' or 'better than free' is counter-intuitive and yet it can be a performance improvement. Perhaps we may see another change in priorities in the future though, as systems optimise more and more for power consumption over raw speed... (There are SSDs that do transparent compression/decompression. I wonder if there are RAM chips out there that do the same thing for performance?) To be fair to ARM, their original decision to stick to fixed size instructions was probably correct at the time, when the limiting factor in performance was entirely CPU, and memory speeds were not so much a bottleneck.