> modern x86 (everything since the original Pentium) breaks instructions into uops anyway and caches those, so if anything I'd say the M1 is impressive despite

> modern x86 (everything since the original Pentium) breaks instructions into uops anyway and caches those, so if anything I'd say the M1 is impressive despite having relatively large fixed-length instructions I believe this is covered in the medium article that was linked, in part of the discussion on the number of decoders x86 processors have vs the m1. It is in fact this process of breaking instructions into uops that seems to be the bottleneck, and it is apparently not easy to improve this due to the complexities introduced by variable length instructions. If you have reason to think that part of the article is wrong I'm interested in hearing it, I'm not an expert on modern day processor architecture techniques so I don't really have an insider perspective on this issue.