x86 is NOT dense - it averages nearly 4 bytes per instruction on workloads such as SPEC. And not everybody wants to go through the design effort to support var

x86 is NOT dense - it averages nearly 4 bytes per instruction on workloads such as SPEC. And not everybody wants to go through the design effort to support variable-length encoding (it's non-trivial and can potentially increase pipeline latency to support it). It very well could become a de facto RISC-V standard, but that remains to be seen.