Easing the transition until x86 can be relegated to emulation. Uh, isn't that the point? X86 has been "emulated" since the P6/nexgen 586. That is why people t

Easing the transition until x86 can be relegated to emulation. Uh, isn't that the point? X86 has been "emulated" since the P6/nexgen 586. That is why people talk about the architecture not mattering much anymore in the face of very similar OoO microarchitectures running arm/ppc/x86/etc code. Or I guess you could look at it another way, CISC won because it turns out that implementing specific high level functions like say AES, memcpy or vector ops are better implemented with explicit hardware blocks, or provide additional hinting that gives the micro architecture an advantage, while the costs of cracking inconvenient sequences into simpler ones means that effectively the processor designer has the choice between attempting to build hardware for something like Arm's Load/store Multiple or simply breaking it into a sequence of uOps (which one might suggest is basically the modern equivilant of micro code). And this is why I'm a bit skeptical of RISC-V at the moment. No serious architect of high performance microprocessors can think that designing an architecture to match a modern low transistor budget microcontroller is a good design choice. Because like every other single RISC processor, what happens over time is that they are forced to add higher level instructions for the additional hinting they can provide. If you look at the past 10 years of arm architecture updates you can read between the lines of "the RISC solution for X we were using couldn't compete with vendor Y's product so we added this instruction/etc to solve the problem". Same with POWER, they even gave up on their famous inverted page tables because it was basically a software managed TLB and it turns out building page walking hardware is a better solution than writing software to do it. Its also how no one takes a processor without some kind of SIMD seriously anymore. That said, its not like RISC-V can't evolve into something "good enough" its just going to be stuck with a bunch of ugly baggage by the time it gets there because its starting with a false set of premises.