x86 specifically is extra awful to decode because there's no easy way to tell the instruction length without doing a good portion of the decode process, so it e

x86 specifically is extra awful to decode because there's no easy way to tell the instruction length without doing a good portion of the decode process, so it ends up needing to attempt to decode at each byte offset. Valid lengths being all between 1 and 15 doesn't help. So processing a fetched 16 bytes requires doing 16 partial decodes, each of them non-trivial (skip over unordered prefix bytes; parse fixed prefix before opcode (most bytes are the opcode immediately, except 0x0F, 0xC4, 0xC5, and more for rarer instructions & AVX-512/APX, which have extra skipping necessary); index a LUT by the opcode (with a different table for the 0x0F case, and maybe more cases idk; plus maybe some more length depending on byte after opcode; for some opcodes the length even depends on if a specific prefix byte was given, which intel just assumes doesn't happen and behaves slowly if it does); if the opcode needs ModR/M, also parse that from the next byte (another variable-length sequence)).