Lol, sadly true. Usually young people thinking "I've got to write code like I saw in DOOM's source..."
You do realize that the pipeline isn't just a pipe that stuff goes through, right? I mean, there are branch target buffers, look ahead adders, PATH optimization hardware, et cetera. All for precisely that reason.
Not in the last 10 years ;). Then add in the fact that RISC means more instructions per operation. Basically, RISC and CISC are comparable overall in efficiency for now. Ultimately, Intel will prove that CISC will prevail (given longer pipelines.)
Things don't work this way anymore unless you're tuning a game for a specific processor as a one off (and potentially a particular L1/L2 setup.)
You realize that Alpha went one way and Intel another, right?
But it isn't. RISC and CISC are the semantically except that one use smaller words than the other (using language as a metaphor.) The words ultimately band together to say the same thing. The reason RISC was so hot when it was being initially pushed (and why it isn't a big deal now) is because all of that secondary hardware (such as BTBs, PATH hardware, intelligent cache loaders/unloaders, vftbl optimizers [sometimes just another BTB]) was relatively crude or didn't yet exist which made longer pipelines much more liable to stall and made RISC operate faster in many situations. Ironically, optimizing your Intel CISC code back then would be done to approach RISC-like performance, but that was a looong time ago.
I'm sure they do, because the associated hardware is easier and cheaper to produce; however, for pure performance reasons, CISC is currently the king.
WTH