The "excess baggage" argument being made in the article dates back decades, to the earliest RISC vs. CISC days, and within the Mac ecosystem that argument ended when Apple ditched PowerPC and went to x86.
Back in the 1990s you could make a pretty good argument for RISC architectures vs CISC ones like x86, because the circuitry for all those "extra" instructions took up a lot of die space. But new processes have meant that the percentage of die space that must be devoted to the x86 instruction set gets smaller and smaller with each generation. In other words, if x86 was going to lose out to RISC architectures, it would have happened in the 1990s. Their advantage has only eroded since then.
The "excess baggage" argument being made in the article dates back decades, to the earliest RISC vs. CISC days, and within the Mac ecosystem that argument ended when Apple ditched PowerPC and went to x86.
Back in the 1990s you could make a pretty good argument for RISC architectures vs CISC ones like x86, because the circuitry for all those "extra" instructions took up a lot of die space. But new processes have meant that the percentage of die space that must be devoted to the x86 instruction set gets smaller and smaller with each generation. In other words, if x86 was going to lose out to RISC architectures, it would have happened in the 1990s. Their advantage has only eroded since then.