I think it’s a legacy of the enormous marketing push around RISC. Marketers at Apple, IBM, SGI, ARM, Sun, even Nintendo drilled into the collective computer ind

I think it’s a legacy of the enormous marketing push around RISC. Marketers at Apple, IBM, SGI, ARM, Sun, even Nintendo drilled into the collective computer industry’s head that the distinction was extremely important, and we’ve never shaken it, even as the distinction’s importance has faded. (And to be fair to those marketers, for a time the microarchitectural improvements that the RISC movement wrought really were enormous.)