Sometimes I am sadly slow at replying to comments. So I am hoisting mymy reply to a comment on my first entry on why x86 won against RISC into an entry.

From --M's comment:

It's my understanding that modern CPUs don't execute the x86 machinecode directly, they're actually RISC processors that execute a programthat can run and optimise x86 instructions.

While this is true as far as I know, it doesn't mean that