At the core is a quantitative approach to computer design and analysis that uses empirical observations of programs, experimentation, and simulation as its tools.
So they (rightly) do not judge what is the best solution for all time, they just claim that in 1988 RISC outperformed CISC.
As an aside, I was at a memorable CHIPS(?) conference and Dave House VP at Intel followed speakers from MIPS, SPARC, etc (RISC guys) and opened by looking at his watch and saying "it's now 11am and Intel made more CPUs this morning than all the RISC guys ever made in their entire history" ... so process / scale cannot be ignored.
At the core is a quantitative approach to computer design and analysis that uses empirical observations of programs, experimentation, and simulation as its tools.
So they (rightly) do not judge what is the best solution for all time, they just claim that in 1988 RISC outperformed CISC.
As an aside, I was at a memorable CHIPS(?) conference and Dave House VP at Intel followed speakers from MIPS, SPARC, etc (RISC guys) and opened by looking at his watch and saying "it's now 11am and Intel made more CPUs this morning than all the RISC guys ever made in their entire history" ... so process / scale cannot be ignored.