Look I'm a fan of x86 processors for the high end, because the gap is just that large. But when you are building these MCUs, you actually want your transistor c

Look I'm a fan of x86 processors for the high end, because the gap is just that large. But when you are building these MCUs, you actually want your transistor count to be as small as possible. These chips don't have anything complicated going on. They probably have a simple five stage pipeline with most of the transistors going into the minimum 32 general purpose registers, CSR registers and pipeline registers instead of actual logic.