And one that largely obviates almost every point made. In point of fact, in the 31 years (!) since this was posted the "clearly most successful/performant/useful/best" processor at any moment has almost always been an implementation of one particular CISC ISA that violates almost every rule Mashey posits.

This happened to look right in 1991 because SPARC and MIPS were riding high at that moment in history. Both would fall behind x86 a few years later.

And more to the point: this only looks right at this particular moment because Intel fell off the edge and Apple jumped ahead with a TSMC-manufactured part. But that's almost entirely down to process technology. If Intel was using TSMC's process then it's likely that the M1 switchover never would have happened.

AMD uses TSMC. Apple’s cores are still faster than AMD’s. Regardless, ARMv8 isn’t exactly RISC.

One example over three decades doesn't prove much. As pointed out, in 1992 the best CPU in the world was a SuperSPARC, with the MIPS R4000 about to leapfrog it. It didn't stick. I didn't say x86 offerings were uniformly and always better than RISC ISAs. I said it was almost always better, which sort of demolishes Mashey's arguments about the inherent superiority of the ISA design.

And in any case you're wrong on the facts. The M2 and Zen 3 cores are not being fabbed on the same process; AMD is still on 7nm for its CPU products vs. 5nm for Apple. Their use of 5nm is exclusively for GPUs so far.