This is getting off-topic, but ARMs success had nothing to do with RISC vs. CISC.  It was that _Alpha_ engineers took their skill to the ARM ISA (which at the time had only very weak implementations).  They created StrongARM which made people sit up and take notice.  Intel ironically inherited the technology and continued developing it under the XScale name.  So, yes, Intel in part created their own ARM problem.<p>I feel I have to repeat again that none of this had to do with RISC vs. CISC.  It had to do with implementation and market muscle.<p>&quot;Alphas relied primarily on clock frequency to achieve their performance, and were very power-hungry as a result&quot;<p>So was the P4 and it failed, but Intel had enough capital to take a power efficiency clue from Transmeta and turn the ship 180 degrees.<p>What killed the Alpha was three things: delays in getting the new models out, the cost of staying in this game, and of course, the arrival of Itanic.<p>EDIT: An aside: the 64-bit extension of ARM is a completely new and different ISA called AArch64 which incidentally is a lot more RISC-like than the original ARM.  IOW, it looks like the ARM designers disagree with you.