[phyrrus9]

That was a pretty good post.

ARM is a lot more efficient than x86, as x86 is CISC, and ARM is RISC. (you only mentioned that ARM is RISC, not the other way)

x86 is a lousy design, and was made pretty quickly. However, it seems that since the Pentium Pro, Intel CPUs have a RISC core, with CISC instructions that are broken down into smaller instructions (still not great). A well designed CISC CPU could have some advantages over RISC-ones (but RISC is still better in the long run), but x86 is not well designed. Intel did try to make a CPU line that uses neither RISC nor CISC, called Itanium (IA), but that is a complete failure (yeah, it's still around), as everyone already targets ARM and x86, and nobody is targeting IA-64/IA-32.

Very interesting that you know how all that works. That process is called microcoding. You can see hints of this in the linux kernel, it contains a sort of map of the individual things it can do.