> Almost every application multiplies and divides all the time anyway This is the crux of the RISC philosophy: Most things happen "all the time" in processors

> Almost every application multiplies and divides all the time anyway This is the crux of the RISC philosophy: Most things happen "all the time" in processors since they do a lot of things very fast, but what really matters is how often. The quantitative approach is actually looking at what instruction mix and its fastest implementation given to a reasonably competent compiler prouduces fastests overall results (given that simpler chips could be clocked faster, have shorter pipelines so better branching, leave more space for cache, etc). The thing about multiplicationsan divisions, besides being slow in silicon, is that you can actually cover a surprisingly big part of application code multiplies with just a couple of shifts and adds. This is especially true for constant multiply or a known smallish range of multipliers, which optimizers are good at discovering. But of course the transistor budgets and tradeoffs were different in the days of early RISC. Still, even the relatively recent RISC-V elided multiply and divide from the base instruction set.