>>34
It's barely a few dozen pages
Maybe if you're writing programs for an XT. After all of the recent extensions and obsolete garbage introduced in the last 30 years it's several thousand. All of this garbage takes up space on the dies and in the minds of programmers but can't be thrown away because when x86 boots it's 16-bit and pretends it only has 1 MB of RAM. The OS needs this 16-bit garbage to unlock the modern instructions. MIPS doesn't have hundreds of pages of legacy garbage and short-sighted decisions like x86 does. The
entire user-mode MIPS instruction set can be described in a few dozen pages. Why isn't MIPS popular in desktops today? Because SGI believed Intel about the Itanium and cancelled their MIPS designs. Soon after, they filed for bankruptcy.