I would like to suggest that the classical taxonomy of RISC/CISC dichotomy is basically non-existent nowadays -- namely because both sides have influenced each other. It is well known that CISC has taken a lot of inspirations from RISC designs (such as having a lot more registers in x64), and RISC designs also taken some inspirations from CISC (such as having SIMD/vectorization units). In other words, the line between RISC and CISC has been very fine lately.<p>Also, at the end of the day, they all turned into μops. If I remember Jim Keller correctly, ARM and x86, they are basically the same in the back nowadays, its just the frontend and their decoding units are different. And that's why he strongly suggested AMD to also adapt Zen design with ARM ISA during his tenure there, oh I think it is called K12.<p>I think there is another blurry line between superscalar and VLIW architecture, too.