"CISC processors are dead today [...] Intel (and later AMD and others of course) started making processors with a RISC core that support the x86" That's a pret

"CISC processors are dead today [...] Intel (and later AMD and others of course) started making processors with a RISC core that support the x86" That's a pretty far fetched argument. RISC/CISC is about instruction set, and the x86 instruction set is CISC. Of course since the big RISC/CISC battle the implementations have converged a lot on the microarchitecture level, primarily because the transistor budget sweet spot targeted by RISC melted away and the amount of chip area saved in instruction decode and ISA simplicity was later dwarfed by out-of-order machinery, caches etc. So an equally valid argument (as "CISC is dead") is "RISC is dead" since RISC chips today have brainiac instructions and pipelines like divide/multiply, unaligned access, variable length instructions (Thumb on ARM), out-of-order execution etc.