Intel is a one-trick pony. When all you have is x86, then x86 becomes the answer to everything. CISC offered an interesting advantage to RISC - if you have ins

Intel is a one-trick pony. When all you have is x86, then x86 becomes the answer to everything. CISC offered an interesting advantage to RISC - if you have instructions for everything, then given a long enough time frame, you could optimize the heck out of each and every instruction, so the advantages of RISC would be minimal. However, x86 is purely ugly hackery with such ridiculously variable instruction lengths, a paucity of registers and enhancements which have been made more in the interest of marketing than in actual progress (see Linus' recent comments about AVX-512). x86 still could be optimized, but you end up over a long enough time with what we have now - so much extra silicon handling so many edge cases and making attempts to eek tiny performance gains out of an ugly, horrible ISA that even the best of what 2020 has to offer can't compete with a clean architecture like ARM that doesn't have all that crappy legacy. The fact that AMD has outperformed Intel is also telling - AMD went back to the drawing board, probably not just proverbially, and reinvented ways to get that horrible instruction set to perform better, which is probably something Intel has wished they had the foresight to start to do ten years ago. It's also telling that Intel's security has been as bad as it has - it shows that Intel has cared about performance to the precise detriment of security. It doesn't matter how many billions of dollars of legacy you have pushing the architecture if you're constantly operating at a pronounced disadvantage. Even now, Intel is pretending that their big / little x86 cores is something new. ARM has been doing that for almost a decade.