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Yeah that seems odd. The article says: "While almost no modern applications read these AF and PF bits" It can't really be legacy software, as most AMD64 softw

Yeah that seems odd. The article says: "While almost no modern applications read these AF and PF bits" It can't really be legacy software, as most AMD64 software on the Mac is fairly recent (2006) and I suspect that we're talking software older than that for the AF and PF to be in regular use. So it also have to be something fairly important like virtualization or something used in image processing or compression. It seems like overkill for something that would be a problem for an end-user application that would transition to Apple Silicon anyway.

rockdoe 4y ago
Isn't it more like that computing these flags is basically free in hardware? So might as well add support for it.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Sure, but designing those flags into the hardware has to come at a cost. Maybe it's simple and cheap enough that it doesn't matter.
  - bni 4y ago
    Could it have been a test case "to see if we can" do these kinds of things. And then it got left in with the more important stuff