3 ms·
Depends on how much of the complexity described in those thousands of pages of documentation is actually necessary, and how much could be eliminated with a bett
by mwcampbell 10y ago
Depends on how much of the complexity described in those thousands of pages of documentation is actually necessary, and how much could be eliminated with a better design.
- Someone 10y agoLots of it isn't so much bad design as not willing to give up backwards compatibility. Some examples: - the old floating point register stack and its 80-bit registers - I don't know how many iterations on SIMD instructions (MMX, a few iterations of SSE, a few iterations of AVX, various prefixes to make older instructions use newer registers) If you got rid of those, you also could get rid of quite a few prefix instructions, maybe a configuration bit here and there, etc. It also doesn't help that, at times, Intel and AMD independently added stuff to the x86.