Comment by ndiddy

I disagree with the author's point that CPU instruction sets should expose more of the CPU's implementation. This has been tried in the past and failed to work long-term. One example of this is branch delay slots from some RISC processors (such as MIPS and SuperH) designed in the late 80s and early 90s. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it basically means that the instruction after a branch instruction will get run regardless of if the branch was taken or not. This was a short-term benefit, as it meant the job of avoiding pipeline stalls after a branch was left to the programmer, so the processor could be simpler and cheaper than designs without them. However, as time went on, the processor designs evolved with more complex pipelines, so the single instruction wasn't enough to cover the branch delay. Instead, it became a legacy issue that future processors had to deal with for compatibility reasons and made their branch prediction and pipeline logic more complex.