Pretty much every high-power high-efficiency core (whether x86 or arm or PowerPC or whatever) breaks instructions up into an extremely reduced instruction and executes those. There was a point where Pentium processors were effectively just executing RISC. There's a great write-up about it here: https://fanael.github.io/is-x86-risc-internally.html
Yes, I knew that. Was thinking of mentioning it but decided it muddled the message. RISC didn't win in the end, it just created techniques that got borrowed to make CISC better.
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Pretty much every high-power high-efficiency core (whether x86 or arm or PowerPC or whatever) breaks instructions up into an extremely reduced instruction and executes those. There was a point where Pentium processors were effectively just executing RISC. There's a great write-up about it here: https://fanael.github.io/is-x86-risc-internally.html
Yes, I knew that. Was thinking of mentioning it but decided it muddled the message. RISC didn't win in the end, it just created techniques that got borrowed to make CISC better.