Perhaps the answer is that x86 is far more general purpose than that. Many of the instructions are as old as the Millennial workforce at Intel who is building t

Perhaps the answer is that x86 is far more general purpose than that. Many of the instructions are as old as the Millennial workforce at Intel who is building their chips, from an era where the web wasn't a concern and GUIs were uncommon. A vast amount of transistors are dedicated to a different optimization than what the software of this decade cares about. OTOH ARM and Apple have tailored their chips to the workload of ~10 years ago (running Javascript at single-digit watts) which is far more tailored to what actually gets used these days.