> - Why do microprocessors not strive for simplicity, implement only a handful of instructions in an optimized way, with a very small chip footprint, to be foll

> - Why do microprocessors not strive for simplicity, implement only a handful of instructions in an optimized way, with a very small chip footprint, to be followed by proliferation of cores (think 256-core, 512-core, 1024-core). Because that would not make CPUs faster or cheaper. If you think that modern CPUs are large because they implement a lot of instructions, you are completely wrong. The entire machinery needed for executing more than a couple of different instructions is less than 1% of the core. The space is not taken up by decoding tables or ALUs, it's taken up by forwarding networks, registers, and most of all, cache. And all of those are things very much required to make a CPU fast. CPUs have a lot of instructions precisely because the cost of implementing a new instruction is negligible compared to the size of the CPU.