Many cost relationships from TFA have already been more or less true for the 32-bit CPUs launched after 1990 and they all became true for the 32-bit high-end CPUs launched after 2000 (like Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon XP), when the difference between the CPU clock frequency and the DRAM latency became almost as high as today.

Only for the 32-bit CPUs used in microcontrollers, which may have clock frequencies under 100 MHz and which may lack a cache hierarchy, the cost differences between many kinds of operations may collapse.

For instance even for not too old 32-bit CPUs it is right to classify the instructions in the following groups, based on their cost in clock cycles:

1. Simple integer operations with operands in registers

2. Loads from the L1 cache memory and simple floating-point operations, like addition and multiplication

3. Loads from the L2 cache memory, division (integer or floating-point), square root and mispredicted branches

4. Loads from the L3 cache memory and atomic read-modify-write operations (like atomic exchange, atomic fetch-and-add, atomic compare-and-swap)

5. Loads from the main memory

This classification matches the chart from TFA.

A CPU implementing C++ as a microarchitecture…? Finally, uncontrovertible proof of the prophesy. We really are living in a Cthulhu nightmare.

Simulation theory is dead.

do we have "modern" 32-bit CPUs?

That title got me:

Modern C++ CPUs as in LISP CPUs or as in Verilog CPUs?

Came here to say exactly that.