And the main question: Is it overall better (faster and less power hungry) than a reduced instruction set, powerful laptop ARM based CPU which is around the corner (Qualcomm)? Guessing not...
A Ferrari will beat a tractor on every test bench numbers and every track, but I can't plow the field with a Ferrari, so any improvements in tractor technology is still welcome despite they'll never beat Ferraris.
If you're talking apps before say 2015 (10 years ago), they can be emulated on ARM faster than they ran natively. That rules out 95% of the backward compatibility argument.
Most more recent apps are very portable. They were written in a managed language running on a cross-platform runtime. The source code is likely stored in git so it can be tracked down and recompiled.
Over 15 years of modern smartphones has ensured that most low-level libraries have support for ARM and other ISAs too as being ISA-agnostic has once again become important. Apple's 4 years of transition aren't to be underestimated either. Lots of devs/creatives use ARM machines and have ensured that pretty much all of the biggest pro software runs very well on non-x86 platforms.
Yes, some stuff remains, but I don't think the remaining stuff is as big a deal as some people claim.
Non-embedded POWER implementations are around 1000 opcodes, depending on the features supported, and even MIPS eventually got a square-root instruction.
> The key operational concept of the RISC computer is that each instruction performs only one function (e.g. copy a value from memory to a register).
and in fact that page even mentions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_comput... that
> Some CPUs have been specifically designed to have a very small set of instructions—but these designs are very different from classic RISC designs, so they have been given other names such as minimal instruction set computer (MISC) or transport triggered architecture (TTA).
13900K lost couple of % in single tread performance, which lead to 14900K being so overclocked/overvolted that it lead to it being useless for what it's made for - crunching numbers. See https://www.radgametools.com/oodleintel.htm.