What’s the practical advantage? It’s easy enough to flip an x86 into 64 bit mode at boot. Surely, slowing down emulation of 32-bit operating systems isn’t a w

What’s the practical advantage? It’s easy enough to flip an x86 into 64 bit mode at boot. Surely, slowing down emulation of 32-bit operating systems isn’t a win (and neither is forcing pointer heavy code to ~double its heap size in the rare cases where that matters). I guess it’ll save some transistors, but those are pretty much free these days.