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In what way does that matter? Who writes x86 assembly for these chips?

Compilers produce denser code on CISC (x86) than RISC (ARM), so x86 has an advantage over ARM.

http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~vince/papers/iccd09/iccd09_densi...

ARM recommends using Thumb2 for non-legacy software. Thumb2 is denser than x86, so actually ARM is the one with the advantage here (unless you have an existing ARM codebase).

Isn't Thumb targeted for memory-constrained architectures?

Thumb1 sort of sucked at performance so the only people who used it were the ones who were very memory-constrained. Thumb2 is much better.

I guess there is tons on the die just to convert CISC to RISC. That about it.

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