RISC VS CISC

Why are modern cpus still using cisc at the top layer?

>>19
Have you looked at the x86 opcodes in octal?
The authors of 8080 and 8086 references (including Intel's own references) are apparently not aware of the octal nature of their own machines, and the result is an almost grotesque complication and bungling up in the presentation of something that is actually fairly simple.  Thus, people claim that it's almost impossible to know 8086 binary by heart, whereas in fact I know most of it by memory.  I'll straighten out the mess for you here.
http://www.lpjjl.net/pgm/fichiers/docasm/OPCODE.txt
Why does Intel present the opcodes in hex which makes it look ugly and haphazard instead of in octal as it was designed to be?

>>24
People aren't very familiar with octal. The Intel engineers might've never noticed that themselves when they were designing, even though they figured 3 bits = enough for all GP regs they didn't think it would be octal digits.

The Z80 is similar:
http://www.z80.info/decoding.htm

>>24
I memorized most opcodes the same way, but in hex. I feel pretty stupid for not realizing I should've been using octal in the first place, now.

>>25
People aren't very familiar with octal.
When the 8086 came out in 1978 there were more computers that used octal in their descriptions than there are today. People familiar with programming would have known octal, and there's no reason why learning octal would be any harder than learning hexadecimal. Unix escape codes typically used octal instead of hexadecimal. The PDP-10 and PDP-11 manuals wrote everything related to instruction formats in octal, and they had 8 registers too.