Intel loves performance, because people want performance. Complexity is the cost of increased performance. As an example, I would guess that of the ~2000 pages of the instruction set reference, at a minimum 1000 pages document the various SIMD instructions. You don't need those, or the floating point operations, or SHA instructions, but I don't see any harm done by making them available.
I think the single instruction which can do the entire job without any magic assist is subneg x, y, z:
Subtract location x from location y; store the result in location y; and branch to location z if result is less than 0; else proceed to next.
Or various trivial variations of the same idea.
Any complication beyond this is no more than syntactical sugar and performance optimization.
If you focus only on direct memory addressing (no indirect or indexed), mine does still work, but mov doesn't. I think.
It's just some CPU instructions!
Maybe they aren't doing a good job of describing them succinctly?
These things aren't written to be brief, they are written to be complete.
It's difficult to argue with someone starting from this level of wrong.
Power on reset, shift, decode, execute, repeat.
Intel loves complexity, which is why they invented USB: another tree killer.
The processor doesn't do anything. In all that silicon and its pages of documentation, you can't even find a parser for assembly language; you need software for that.
In spite of 4000+ pages of documentation, printing "Hello, world" on a screen requires additional hardware, and a very detailed program. Want a linked list, or regex pattern matching? Not in the 4000 pages; write the code.
And this is just the architecture manuals software developers. This is not documentation of the actual silicon. What it contains:
This document contains all seven volumes of the Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual: Basic Architecture, Instruction Set Reference A-L, Instruction Set Reference M-Z, Instruction Set Reference, and the System Programming Guide, Parts 1, 2 and 3. Refer to all seven volumes when evaluating your design needs.
Instruction set references and system programming guide; that's it!
Note also that this is not the programming documentation for a system on a chip (SoC). There is nothing in this 4000+ page magnum opus about any peripheral. No serial ports, no real time clocks, no ethernet PHY's, no A/D D/A converters; nothing. Just CPU.