Ah, my apologies. I wonder how much they'd actually save, in die area, if they removed 32bit mode while leaving in the ability to run 32bit code in 64bit mode.

Ah, my apologies. I wonder how much they'd actually save, in die area, if they removed 32bit mode while leaving in the ability to run 32bit code in 64bit mode. If it's just decoding to similar microops with slightly different parameters depending on the mode they're returning to, probably not that much, except in the decoder itself...