> A disadvantage of the RISC design was that since programs required more instructions, they took up more space in memory. Back in the late 1970s, when the first generation of CPUs were being designed, 1 megabyte of memory cost about $5,000. So any way to reduce the memory size of programs (and having a complex instruction set would help do that) was valuable. This is why chips like the Intel 8080, 8088, and 80286 had so many instructions.

> But memory prices were dropping rapidly. By 1994, that 1 megabyte would be under $6. So the extra memory required for a RISC CPU was going to be much less of a problem in the future.

I think this is still a problem? Not memory size, but the speed of the memory bus.