RISC is about the ISA not the micro ops. One of the points of RISC is to give the compiler a simpler instruction set to deal with. Micro-ops are invisible to th

RISC is about the ISA not the micro ops. One of the points of RISC is to give the compiler a simpler instruction set to deal with. Micro-ops are invisible to the compiler. You cannot spend a bunch of extra compile time to rearrange things in an optimal fashion. Micro-ops is an implementation detail you can change at any time. The ISA you are stuck with for a long time. Thus saying x86 is RISC-like doesn't make sense it would imply that the x86 ISA is RISC-like which it is not. The benefits of uops is separate from the benefits of RISC. Even RISC processor can turn their instructions into uops. You cannot break CISC instructions into uops in as easy and steady stream as a RISC instruction which has a much more even level of complexity.