Correct. In fact, I think there’s actually something slightly evil about anyone who advocates for x86. It’s suspicious. It makes me wonder what other character flaws such people possess.
I mean, let’s think about it.
You start with the Intel 4004. It was made to be used as a calculator. Then you go to the 8008, which was meant to be used in simple microcontrollers. 8080 inherited all the bad design decisions from those two chips. 8086 added more memory support (which, of course, being CISC, and given the time period, was not designed with thought of caching, virtual memory, and modern memory hierarchy thoughts in mind).
80186 - complete and utter failure.
80286 - all the same bad design decisions are still there.
80386 - first real improvements (most with respect to addressing), but still has all that baggage.
80486 - yep, more of the same.
80586 - ditto. CHange the name!
x86-64 - 64 bit. The guy who first designed the integer 64bit extensions is a genius, but the rest of it? Yuck! ;-)
Meanwhile Intel is off with Merced/Itanium, which was another disaster.
Yeah, its awful.