I agree with your underlying point, I just think that it's a little deceptive to compare a modern, $750 computer's processor to a $100,000+ mainframe's without

I agree with your underlying point, I just think that it's a little deceptive to compare a modern, $750 computer's processor to a $100,000+ mainframe's without acknowledging that they were also designed with a very different budget. I was wondering about how much the processor itself influences things a few days ago while reading an interview with Charles Moore in which he described Forth-native processors, but I've done very little with any assembly languages directly, so it's kind of beyond my ken. (Most of what I know about different architectures has to do with porting C programs.)