Re: From what I hear, a "core" is...
RISC is RISC - it could theoretically have microcode*, its just that people discovered that a lot of the time a compiler could optimise stuff and make things a lot faster than the same source compiled for the microcoded stuff. When memory was as valuable as the CPU then microcoded stuff seemed like a good idea. Sophie Wilson seems to have spotted that the simplicity of the 6502 could be combined with a limited instruction set, 32 bits and still burn through source code faster than MISC and using a lot less CO2!
The meaning of core will disappear as number crunching chips for AI come more online - my RaspberryPi ARM CPU has vector processing code which are surprisingly nippy for doing some maths stuff and I can see more generalise arrays of this sort of stuff optimised in different way for AI rather than, say graphics, which will become very important in the future but IBM seem to have shown 8bit maths is more than adequate for a huge amount of AI stuff so how many 8bit cores does a 64bit 'core' count as?
* you could argue that memory cache is a form of microcode but for memory access rather than ALU access.
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