Well it is apples to oranges. In the late 70s, high-end RAM was maybe 250ns, so you wanted a 5mhz CPU. In order to clock that on the VAX, they implemented numer

Well it is apples to oranges. In the late 70s, high-end RAM was maybe 250ns, so you wanted a 5mhz CPU. In order to clock that on the VAX, they implemented numerous smaller micro operations and associated specialized TTL and then used microcode. So this limited the maximum propagation delay possible for any single cycle micro-op at the expense of complexity and power. Then each macro sizsd op took variable cycles. Also, the VAX had 4 priv states, ecc capable dram controller, i/o, fault recovery and the like.