x86 is closer to RISC designs than "respectable CISC" of the era that defined the split between RISC and CISC. It's why huge chunk of instructions on modern x86

x86 is closer to RISC designs than "respectable CISC" of the era that defined the split between RISC and CISC. It's why huge chunk of instructions on modern x86 can execute in essentially one cycle - the encoding is not all that complex, the instructions are also not all that complex, and majority of "complex addressing" can be pipelined into having an extra stage capable of doing "LEA" instruction on it's own, unlike either VAX or 68k At the point Alpha got killed, it was the fastest option, and then HP had to resurrect it anyway because the supposed Alpha killer (Itanium) was slower in practice. That said, the killing was done by Compaq, not HP - and done fully on politics/vibes not actual thorough thinking. A lot of late Alpha design ended up being "inherited" in ways by later x86 cores - Athlon reused chunks of EV6 architecture which also enabled cheap Alpha motherboards (but made Athlon-MP extra expensive, unfortunately). K8 heavily drank from experience of the team members who worked on EV7 which exhibited the same fabric structure.