Not sure 'academic' is the right word; IMHO it's a market issue. Users care about software, not architectures. This business is littered with the corpses of companies with 'better' in every way architectures, when the vast majority of folks that write checks are saying 'yeah, cool, but I just want it run Excel the same way my current one does but a little faster'.
"academic" as in "theoretically we can have object-oriented instructions in the CPU!" ... "theoretically the compiler can do all the instruction scheduling!" ... in practice oh please no
