> The writing was on the wall that RISC would win [...]

What do you mean by "win" exactly? RISC is just an architectural choice and means nothing on its own. For reference, Google's TPUs, which - according to Google - deliver 30-80x better performance per Watt than contemporary CPUs, use a CISC design instead [1].

This whole "RISC vs CISC"-nonsense is quite inane, given that it's a design choice that's highly application-specific.

It's even debatable, whether the A64FX can even be considered a "pure" RISC design, considering the inclusion of SVE-512 and its 4 unspecified "assistant cores" [2] ...

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-...

[2] https://www.fujitsu.com/jp/Images/20180821hotchips30.pdf

RISC is a philosophy, not so much a set of rules. If you let the creators of RISC define their approach, the division between RISC and CISC becomes more clear. Most summaries of RISC oversimplify it. Maybe that’s ironic, haha.

I remember Cyrix as just releasing Intel compatible/clone chips, am I misremembering something?