Not defending the weirdo, but IBM Z is a thing that is shipping, heavily used, and still evolving. It's more CISC than even x86.

I do find it sad that we are stuck in an 80 year old paradigm that is a horrible fit for how CPUs are actually implemented in 2022, but the inertia is a strong in this one.

Inertia is the same as backward compatibility.

Kinda like gas engines and fuel pumps. Or wall socket formats. Inertia.

I think you are illustrating my point, thanks. Gas engines are surely but slowly being replaced with much better, cleaner, and more efficient alternatives. Wall socket formats are there to stay but increasingly low DC loads are coalescing around USB, with USB-C really accelerating the change.

So yes, we can overcome inertia, it just take a lot of energy.

ARM isn't a pure RISC anymore; it has complex addressing modes and arm7 has different instruction lengths. Complicated instructions are still worth adding if they happen to be hardware efficient, instruction fusing and cracking are expensive too and aren't optimization miracles.

I don't think RISC is a very useful term.

You mean as opposed to the other architectures mentioned in the article? ppc, mips, itanium and alpha. Two of which are utterly dead, one of which looks like it's dying (mips) and one that is little more than a niche product (ppc).

It seems that MIPS has almost been entirely relegated to the academic space for courses on processor architecture

Implying that so called RISC cpus are actually RISC. There is nothing even remotely "reduced" about a modern ARM cpu.

> Notice that it's the only one remaining?

Motorola 68K is still around too.