I guess I'm making the wrong argument. I'd agree it's clear an x86 decoder will be bigger, more power hungry etc than an arm decoder. The real question is how m

I guess I'm making the wrong argument. I'd agree it's clear an x86 decoder will be bigger, more power hungry etc than an arm decoder. The real question is how much of a factor that is for the rest of the micro-architecture? Is the decoder dragging everything down or just a pain you can deal with at some extra bit of power/area cost that doesn't really matter? That's what I was aiming to get at in the call for evidence. Is x86 inherently inferior to arm and cannot scale as well for large super scalar CPUs because the decoder drags you down or is Apple just better at micro-architecture design (perhaps AMD's team would also fail to scale well beyond 4 wide with an arm design, perhaps Apple's team could have built an x86 M1).