> CPUs now dedicate a ton of silicon to decoding the CISC stream into RISC-y microcode.
In absolute terms, this is true. But in relative terms, you're talking less than 1% of the die area on a modern, heavily cached, heavily speculative, heavily predictive CPU.
I hadn't heard that, but certainly, there must have been many times when Intel held the crown of "biggest working hunk of silicon area devoted to RAM."
In absolute terms, this is true. But in relative terms, you're talking less than 1% of the die area on a modern, heavily cached, heavily speculative, heavily predictive CPU.