Playing around with assembly on a RISC machine is fun but that's only because RISC CPUs are the only ones where you do actually know the runtime of every instru

Playing around with assembly on a RISC machine is fun but that's only because RISC CPUs are the only ones where you do actually know the runtime of every instruction. The problem with amd64 is not that there are so many instructions (…just don't use the weird ones) but that the normal ones are optimized in ways that make writing assembly with them difficult if you want to understand why something performs the way it does.