>> "He spent weeks taking us through diagrams of the x86's instruction decode hardware. I was convinced that any processor that had to expend so much of its sil

>> "He spent weeks taking us through diagrams of the x86's instruction decode hardware. I was convinced that any processor that had to expend so much of its silicon just decoding instructions was doomed, not my best insight." I haven't found figures, but I'd be willing to bet there's far more ARM devices in the world than x86. x86 didn't die, but it's not in the same league as ARM in terms of success. Agreed though, the x86 is an absolute dog mainly because of the backward compatibility. Tacking on 32 bit instructions with prefixes, It's a mess.