It's more like x86 beat everything, which is also saying that externally CISC/RISC didn't matter so much. I like the section on RISC here: http://danluu.com/butler-lampson-1999/ Specifically part of the last paragraph: "It’s possible to nitpick RISC being a no by saying that modern processors translate x86 ops into RISC micro-ops internally, but if you listened to talk at the time, people thought that having a external RISC ISA would be so much lower overhead that RISC would win, which has clearly not happened. Moreover, modern chips also do micro-op fusion in order to fuse operations into decidedly un-RISC-y operations."