RISC vs. CISC Is the Wrong Lens for Comparing Modern x86, ARM CPUs

Dputiger writes: Go looking for the difference between x86 and ARM CPUs, and you'll run the idea of CISC versus RISC immediately. But 40 years after the publication of David Patterson and David Ditzel's 1981 paper, "The Case for a Reduced Instruction Set Computer," CISC and RISC are poor top-level categories for comparing these two CPU families.

ExtremeTech writes:

"The problem with using RISC versus CISC as a lens for comparing modern x86 versus ARM CPUs is that it takes three specific attributes that matter to the x86 versus ARM comparison — process node, microarchitecture, and ISA — crushes them down to one, and then declares ARM superior on the basis of ISA alone."