Yes, but you're not describing it from the right position. Is instruction decode hard? Yes, if you think about it in isolation (also, fwiw, it's not a permutati

Yes, but you're not describing it from the right position. Is instruction decode hard? Yes, if you think about it in isolation (also, fwiw, it's not a permutation problem as you suggest). But the core has a bunch of other stuff it needs to do that is far harder. Even your lowliest Pentium from 2000 can do instruction decode.