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A comment on Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors. Parent comment

Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by mwcampbell on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @04:35PM (#13126452)
Depends on how much of the complexity described in those thousands of pages of documentation is actually necessary, and how much could be eliminated with a better design.
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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by Someone on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @06:18PM (#13127121)
Lots of it isn't so much bad design as not willing to give up backwards compatibility. Some examples:

- the old floating point register stack and its 80-bit registers

- I don't know how many iterations on SIMD instructions (MMX, a few iterations of SSE, a few iterations of AVX, various prefixes to make older instructions use newer registers)

If you got rid of those, you also could get rid of quite a few prefix instructions, maybe a configuration bit here and there, etc.

It also doesn't help that, at times, Intel and AMD independently added stuff to the x86.

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