[ochrist]

Nice article. Just a couple of comments:

Doesn't the x86 chips also use microcode? There are several differences between RISC and CISC not mentioned here.

(also Sophie was called Roger at this point in time, so the article has been retconed)

[Symmetry]

Yes, the 80286 used microcode and so instruction took several cycles. That's what the article was gesturing at when it said "But another reason was that more complex instructions took longer for a chip to execute. By keeping them simple, you could make every instruction execute in a single clock cycle."

EDIT: Though later, in the Pentium era, x86 started to do simple instructions like `ADD AX, [BX]` without microcode.

[monocasa]

Eh, that's just an internal design decision. The ARM1 used microcode as well.

[LarsDu88]

I felt this article didn't really explain why a RISC chip with more ops could be as fast as a CISC chip with fewer ops.

I think the actual explanation is that the CISC ops are decoded to more or less the same or similar types of RISC ops, but requiring more physical hardware to do the decode, correct?

The tradeoff here being lower memory for instructions, but more silicon+transistors needed for decode hardware.