It annoys me too, especially when the explanation is: “because RISC simpler so it is faster, duh”. However x64 is at disadvantage for instruction decoding (it’s difficult to decode multiple variable length instructions in parallel), and secondly the guarantees for memory coherence across cores. Both come with an extra burden intel can’t eliminate for backward compatibility.
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It annoys me too, especially when the explanation is: “because RISC simpler so it is faster, duh”. However x64 is at disadvantage for instruction decoding (it’s difficult to decode multiple variable length instructions in parallel), and secondly the guarantees for memory coherence across cores. Both come with an extra burden intel can’t eliminate for backward compatibility.
And this disadvantage quantified translates to… 0.1% area, performance, perf/watt, something else?