Actually I've previously made the same claim about the x86 .... I'd argue that of all its generation of CISCS (vax/68k/32K/etc) it was the most RISCy (apart fr

Actually I've previously made the same claim about the x86 .... I'd argue that of all its generation of CISCS (vax/68k/32K/etc) it was the most RISCy (apart from the microcoded segment crud) almost all it's instructions make at most a single memory reference (push/pop are the exceptions) and so are trivially restartable if there's a TLB fault (look at the CRUD! a 68020 throws on the stack, a vax could touch something like 20 pages in one poly instruction) - x86 has no indirect addressing modes, few side effects (no auto increment/decrement except for push/pop) I think that this is one of the reasons why x86 is still with us, it's relatively easy to decompose an x86 instruction into RISCy uops and do OoO/etc