Thinking out of logic

From one very interesting slashdot thread about Virtualization from a user with alias njdj (458173):

It reminds me of an influential paper in the RISC/CISC debate, about 20 years ago. Somebody wrote a C compiler for the VAX that output only a RISC-like subset of the VAX instruction set. The generated code ran faster than the output of the standard VAX compiler, which used the whole (CISC) VAX instruction set. The naive conclusion was that complex instructions are useless. The correct conclusion was that the original VAX compiler was a pile of manure.

This is an important part of thinking logically: It is easy to get to the wrong general conclusion based on a single example, specially if such example is just a benchmark.

In this particular case, twenty years latter we see the CISC architectures doing fine and it is not just a marketing feat.