This was also the very brief time when memory was actually faster than the core, making it possible to contemplate things like large fixed-with instruction encodings, since the main bottleneck with the early CISCs was instruction decoding and not fetch bandwidth; it is unlikely that, had this period not existed, RISC would have developed in the way that it had.
It's ironic that Ditzel went from Berkeley RISC to Bell Labs and helped develop CRISP [1]. This was the invention of the Decoded Instruction Cache which solved the fetch/decode bandwidth problem. You could have a CISC and not have to worry about decode bandwidth. You could have a wide μop and not have to worry about fetch bandwidth.
This was also the very brief time when memory was actually faster than the core, making it possible to contemplate things like large fixed-with instruction encodings, since the main bottleneck with the early CISCs was instruction decoding and not fetch bandwidth; it is unlikely that, had this period not existed, RISC would have developed in the way that it had.