> I suspect this means that there is room for significant improvements in terms of per transistor efficiency with the use of a novel CPU architecture. I seem t

> I suspect this means that there is room for significant improvements in terms of per transistor efficiency with the use of a novel CPU architecture. I seem to recall a comment a while back from an Intel chip designer guy saying that the x86 tax isn't as high as people think. Sure, the instruction set is super-crufty, but according to this guy they had found ways to implement most of the backwards compatible stuff in a way that's transistor efficient. He may have been biased, but didn't think the overhead compared to ARM was too significant. I tried to google for the comment but couldn't find it, apologies for that. If someone with direct processor design experience would chime in that would be great.