It’s not used in those applications as much now obviously, but it’s very much possible.
Sure, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Since then, CPUs have specialized. ARM targets embedded products and they’re pushing into servers, with Apple putting them into laptops, and advertising themselves as “low-power.” X86 targets desktops and servers and advertise themselves as workhorses. Those specializations guide engineering.
The whole point of RISC is that you can get better clock speeds and execute more instructions
Sure, and that’s why RISC tends to go wide, they don’t do as much per instruction, so they need to run lots of instructions.
Complex instructions may take multiple clock cycles to complete, especially if you count various sub-circuits. ARM is getting more and more of those, but X86 is notorious for it, and it gets really complicated to predict execution time since it depends on how the CPU reorders instructions. But generally speaking, ARM pushes for going wide, and X86 pushes for more IPC on fewer cores (pipelining, out of order execution, etc).
So that’s the idea I’m trying to get across. Basically what Youtube reviewers call “generational IPC improvements.”
So it’s not even fair to say ARM has more accelerators on chip
It was an example to get away from specifics like putting memory controllers, disk controllers, etc on the CPU instead of the northbridge or whatever. X86 has done a lot of this recently too, but ARM is still more of a SOC than just a CPU.
But yes, the line is getting blurred the more ARM targets X86-dominant markets.