nesdev.com

It comes down to how they take their clocks and how they are marketed.

So a 6502 takes a a 2 phase non-overlapping clock, this basically gives it a 2mhz clock from a 1Mhz clock. This means its clock drivers are more complicated. The Z80 for example takes a 4Mhz clock, single phase. The 6510 fixed the clock issue and generates the clock internally from a single input clock. So from the 1Mhz clock the 6502 gets 4 events, from the 4Mhz clock the Z80 gets 4 events.

You can't just have something happen from nothing, you need an "event" to trigger it, and to gate the logic steps.
Say LDA #4
Phi2 Hi: You need put the PC on the address bus
Phi2 Lo: You need to read the data from the data bus
Phi1 Hi: decode the opcode
Phi1 Lo: increment the PC
Phi2 Hi: put the PC on the address bus
Phi2 Lo:read the data from the data bus
Phi1 Hi: set the A with the value
Phi1 Lo: increment the PC

Waiting cycles is not for RAM, you can just slow down the clock speed if you want to use slower RAM.

Take the Z80
Clock 0 : put PC on address bus
Clock 1 : increment PC
Clock 2 : read value from data bus
Clock 4 : Do Ram Refresh, decode Instruction
Clock 5 : put PC on address bus
Clock 6 : increment PC
Clock 7 : read value from data bus into A

If you want to do more things at once, you need to have move adders and the like on the die. So if you do it step by step you can use the ALU to increment the PC, as well as do an ADD instruction. Each bit of parallelization requires more die, which drops the number of CPUs per wafer and more gates equals higher chance of a chip failing and hence yes working chips, so that pushes the price up more.
your max clock speed is determined by which step takes the longest amount of time to do. So you might break a step down into smaller steps which makes it take longer but it allows for a higher clock overall.

Sophie Wilson seems to have just given a talk about the design of the ARM https://hackaday.com/2018/05/08/sophie- ... efficient/

I saw that they talked about the Dhrystone benchmark again. Was that another rigged "see how well a CPU can emulate 68000 instructions 1:1" benchmark? Is it doing math with a bunch of random absolute long addressing?

Dhrystones actually measure integer computational ability. MIPS don't.

I know RISC CPUs need more instructions to load and store memory, but once the memory is loaded into registers, the amount of instructions needed evens out with CISC CPUs.

That is simply not true.

(edit) There are just too many variables for such a flat statement to possibly be true. 8-bit PIC is more-or-less RISC (albeit accumulator-based, so...) but it does a lot less per instruction than any real 32-bit ISA.

VLIW, approximately the CISCiest of CISC things, does tremendously more per instruction during every instruction. By definition. Many modern ISAs include SIMD instructions, which are CISCy, and their corresponding truly-RISCy things are horrifically more verbose than natively supporting SIMD.

Depending on your CISC architecture, your task, whether it's you or a compiler (/how good the compiler is) writing the machine code...

CISC architectures don't just have more powerful addressing modes. They also often have instructions to automate loops, string operations, block memory transfers...even polynomial evaluation.

And while the number of instructions might in some cases be comparable, the number of bytes often aren't - variable length encodings sometimes let CISC ISAs use a single byte for a common instruction that on the RISC side would require four.

Here's a neat paper I found when googling, inspired by this topic. In their measurements they found that CISC generally did tend towards rather denser code. Depending on the problem and the architectures in question, you're often looking at half as much.

Comparing ARM to the 68000, I just don't see that many instructions the 68000 has that the ARM can't do. I never saw anything as complex as polynomial equations in one instruction on the 68000.

If you actually want to see how the 68k is competitive with ARMv1 despite being 8 years older (using half as many instructions per dhrystone), you'll need to look at the actual resulting machine code for both machines.

Otherwise... you're just letting your preconceptions blind you.

What do you mean by "preconceptions"? You think I'm not looking up the actual instruction sets?

Fact: ARMv1 and 68k both clocked at 8MHz calculate comparable number of dhrystones per second, despite ARMv1 executing ≈250% as many instructions. Therefore the ARMv1 must be doing 50% the work per instruction.

If you want to see how this is true, you need to actually look at the sequence of instructions that are used in the dhrystone benchmark on these two machines, not just look at the available instructions.

I don't know if that can be found on the internet.

If a cross-compiler targeting each architecture is available on the Internet, and the source code of Dhrystone is available on the Internet, then the assembly code resulting from compiling Dhrystone can be calculated from these.