The benefit of a lack of a decode step (for arm vs x86, but I assume the analysis is roughly correct for mips) was estimated at RealWorldTech as about 5% of a c

The benefit of a lack of a decode step (for arm vs x86, but I assume the analysis is roughly correct for mips) was estimated at RealWorldTech as about 5% of a core's energy. Given that the amount of energy the cores take up as a portion of the total energy budget, I doubt it would matter for high performance chips - particularly in the face of Intel's 1-2 process generation lead over everyone else. Admittedly, phone chips are a bit lower power than desktop CPUs, but they are pretty beefy these days.