I saw this once before, and both times, it's pretty shocking. Is this really something that needs to be inside the CPU itself? I don't want my CPU doing this. I would rather just take the performance hit and keep the CPU "dumb".
Are you saying you don't want your CPU to have SIMD/vector capabilities, or you want it to have a limited SIMD instruction set without the extra flexibility that AVX-512 brings, or have you wildly misinterpreted the headline (twice?) to assume that AVX-512 adds special-purpose instructions for Unicode conversions?
I think the parent must not understand what SIMD/vector operations are, and probably thinks there is native Unicode support in the CPU. At least, that’s my most favorable interpretation of his critique.
x86 CPUs have been essentially black magic for a while now. If anything, what's described here is on the dumber side for things an x86 CPU from the past decade or two is doing behind the scenes to operate as fast as it does.
You can have "dumb" CPUs all you want, just stick with Z80, 6502, 6809. There's still plenty of fun using those and you can hold most of what they do in your head. Add 68000 and MIPS R2000 for some 32 bit fun if you wish. Anything past that level of tech uses brainy tricks to get the performance going.
