> It's all RISC under the hood anyway, why not give us access to it? The only explanation I can think of is that Intel wants to keep things complicated as a barrier to entry for competition.
It wasn't Intel but AMD that came up with x86-64. Intel (and HP) indeed wanted to give you a clean 64-bit design - Itanium. And yes, it was meant as a barrier to entry among other things. But AMD won because Itanic didn't run existing x86 software and generally turned out to be slower than Intel hyped.
As for the internal RISC, you won't get it because it changes from generation to generation (also between vendors) and these changes are part of why x86 keeps getting faster. Furthermore, AFAIK these internal ops aren't as dense as x86 to make them simpler to decode and fetching them from memory would make bandwidth more of a bottleneck.
It wasn't Intel but AMD that came up with x86-64. Intel (and HP) indeed wanted to give you a clean 64-bit design - Itanium. And yes, it was meant as a barrier to entry among other things. But AMD won because Itanic didn't run existing x86 software and generally turned out to be slower than Intel hyped.
As for the internal RISC, you won't get it because it changes from generation to generation (also between vendors) and these changes are part of why x86 keeps getting faster. Furthermore, AFAIK these internal ops aren't as dense as x86 to make them simpler to decode and fetching them from memory would make bandwidth more of a bottleneck.