The main problem is that most software leans on those misfeatures as a crutch to excuse heaping layers of abstractions. Unfortunately this problem comes from several places, so it's not as easily fixed.
That being said, consider me lined up to buy one of these CPUs.
> And yet, I don't see you or anyone else committing to buy ultra-simple non-pipelined non-OOO desktop/server CPUs.
If you can find a CPU that has the same number of non-cache[1] transistors as a Intel/AMD chip, but spends them on a larger number of simple (and preferably independent/non-hyperthreaded) cores, rather than squandering them on speculative execution and ten thousand obscure model specific registers, I would absolutely buy several of them.
For massively parallel number crunching, GPUs are much better in both performance/watt and performance/dollar. That Xeon Phi 7290 delivers up to 3.45TFlops, costs $3200, and consumes 245W. Compare with GeForce 1080Ti 10.6 TFlops, $700, same 250W.
For general purpose software they don’t work particularly well either. Most IO interfaces is serial, SATA, PCI-X, they have very few wires going to CPU. If you’re IO bound and you don’t have enough single-thread performance you’ll struggle to saturate the bandwidth, doable but very hard.
Also for general-purpose software latency matters. Namely, input to screen latency for desktops and mobiles, or request to response latency for servers. Get Windows or Android tablet with Intel Atom Z8300 (available for $80-100), and see how it performs, it has 4 very similar cores (minus AVX-512), and frequencies are very similar, too.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon... shows at least six volumes of datasheets, and I still haven't found a instruction set refence. I have found https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon... (helpfully labeled "Datasheet, volume 2", rather than anything related to it's contents) which describes a subset of the aformentioned ten thousand random control registers. So no, Intel does not make [simple cores], it makes heaping piles of shit complete with malware ("Intel® Management Engine") buried at D22:F0 on a interal PCI bus.
It isn't simple, it's designed to be incorrect (and even the parts that are supposed to be correct aren't), and I'm not surprised it fails on fast as well.
> I still haven't found a instruction set reference.
X86-64, SSE, AVX, AVX-512, AES-NI, etc. Their key selling point is software compatibility.
> Intel does not make [simple cores]
The cores are quite simple by today’s standards; otherwise Intel wouldn’t be able to pack 72 of them on a single chip. IME is unrelated to the cores, it’s a separate piece of silicon.
But if you don’t like the IME and don’t need backward compatibility with x86, maybe you’ll like this: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-proc... But again, performance benefits of the architecture (48 simple cores) is questionable, GPUs are way faster for parallelizable number crunching, and you need single thread performance for almost everything else.
If you insist on only hiring chauffeurs who drive at 100mph, you can hardly complain when they get into a few accidents.