> If there is anything the article of this thread suggests, it is that we have created a needlessly complex instruction set, and that "efficient specialization"

> If there is anything the article of this thread suggests, it is that we have created a needlessly complex instruction set, and that "efficient specialization" is not valuable to the software 99.99% of the time. The only thing the article suggests is that the author's /usr/bin only includes about 2/3rds of possible x86 instructions, and that a few instructions occur most. The latter is unsurprising and expected in almost any grammar or formal system. The former is also expected given that most specialized instructions are for specialized use in high-performance applications, which are not likely all to be in any individual workstation's /usr/bin. The cruft of specialization is legacy instructions, which as many other comments in this thread point out are usually implemented through microcode only. They don't contribute to complexity of the processor (which can choose to inefficiently implement this with other microinstructions) or the compiler (which can choose to not emit them). I'm all for new blood in general-purpose architectures, but the bloat and inelegance of x86 isn't really something that's mattered for at least a decade.