They’ve looked beyond x86 before. It didn’t go well.

This article is focused on the ancient risc vs cisc mindset that’s outdated, and sort of misses a lot of what’s going on in modern processors. THere’s several facets beyond the ISA that really affect modern processors, especially x86 ones which use a section on their chip to convert x86 instructions into micro-code. It’s something they’ve been doing for like 20+ years now. It’s an optimization that breaks them into simpler codes so they can reorder operations and optimize pipelines to prevent stalls.

There is a better argument to be made about whether the legacy of x86 backwards compatibility is limiting the processors, and that is very real. There’s a lot of really good articles around this, and despite all of the claims, we’ve seen some amazing advancements from both Intel and AMD while still supporting that instruction set.