<i>Dreaming up high level instruction sets is useless because today&#x27;s CPU&#x27;s spend most of their time waiting for memory access</i><p>...which doesn&#x27;t make much sense, because the benefit of small but powerful multicycle instructions is precisely so you can spend the time decoding and executing them (and less time fetching them) while the CPU is waiting for some memory access. One factor that many people seem to forget is that instructions also need to be fetched from memory, and the less bandwidth that takes, the better.