I think many commenters here are viewing this only in terms of die cost. But the blog post is not about that: it's about the other costs that this complexity in

I think many commenters here are viewing this only in terms of die cost. But the blog post is not about that: it's about the other costs that this complexity introduces! Each new feature interacts with all the others in complex ways, and each new feature requires significant new engineering efforts by anyone who has to interact directly with x86 assembly (I sketched a few of these use cases below [1]). The same author has also written [2] about Intel's CET (their attempt to add control flow integrity (CFI) support at the CPU level): > The tail end of Intel's document is rather terrifying; it tries to enumerate the interactions of their CFI feature with all the various execution modes that Intel currently supports, and leaves me with the impression that they're generally heading over the complexity event horizon. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14560267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14560267 [2] http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/06/is-control-flow-integrity-worth.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/06/is-control-flow-integrit...