And speaking of ALGOL

You're forgetting the memory bandwidth for the instruction fetching. RISC machines execute a stream of simple, low-level instructions, whereas CISC machines tend to do fewer, (semantically) higher-level operations - and in the process, use less memory bandwidth for instructions. To be tedious (sorry), for example, instead of of the RISC instruction sequence 'move register Ra to Rt1; add constant X to Rt1; move mem loc (Rt1) to Rt2; add Rn to Rt2; move Rt2 to mem loc (Rt1)', a CISC would just do 'add Rn to mem loc X[Ra]'. Same number of _data_ reads/writes, but a very different count of instruction fetches. The CISC tradeoff (fewer, slower, instructions) made sense 'back in the day', and not just for memory bandwidth - it made for more compact code, back when memory was in very short supply (by today's standards). Now, of course, a number of technological changes - primarily multi-level caches - have changed the 'sweet spot' for optimal instruction complexity, while keeping the memory bandwidth needed for instruction fetches down. Noel