Right. I think what Tannenbaum overlooked was the massive transistor budgets that were on their way thanks to Moore's law. Where early CISC chips had to spend a

Right. I think what Tannenbaum overlooked was the massive transistor budgets that were on their way thanks to Moore's law. Where early CISC chips had to spend a substantial fraction of their transistors on instruction decoding, the absolute number of transistors required for that didn't increase nearly as fast as the total on the chip. So now we have quite complex instruction decoders that translate CISC to RISC, and they're still just a small fraction of the chip.